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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Terror Tales, March 1935 with "Death Takes a Bride!"
Dan Turner scoffed at the tales they told—of the bloody curse on the virgin brides who spent their wedding nights in Malbone—even after he had seen Alma Landy, a week after burial, wandering aimlessly among the moon-bathed tombstones, crying: "Dead!... Dead!... Dead!" It was only when Cora, his own bride of a day, lay cold and dead, victim of the spell, that he learned the full torment of the scorner's hell...
DAN TURNER knew positively now that they were being followed. Stealthy feet were padding through the woods, keeping even pace with theirs. The footfalls ceased when he stopped, suddenly, on the pretense of letting Cora rest; they took up their surreptitious pursuit when Dan and Cora went on again.
He fought to keep his voice steady as he urged his bride of a few hours to greater haste. Poor Cora! Their honeymoon had started with disaster. Some two miles back, their car lay abandoned with a smashed rear-axle, broken by an unseen boulder in a deep puddle of water.
"I know you're tired, honey," he whispered, careful to keep his voice low, "but there must be a village somewhere along this road."
Thin trickles of moonlight pierced the thick overhanging branches. They made a pallid blob of Cora's lovely face, muted the honey color of her smooth, thick hair as it peeped from under a black cloche hat.
She flogged her weary limbs to greater speed, stumbling over the rutted lane. She clung with a desperate grip to her husband's sturdy, reassuring arm.
"Dan!" Her voice, breathing out of the dimly revealed darkness, was throaty with suppressed fear. "There's something—in those woods—following us. I—I'm afraid!"
Unconsciously, he accelerated his pace. He had hoped desperately that Cora would not hear. If only he had a gun, he would not feel so terribly helpless, with the girl he adored acting as a bait to whatever foul thing it was that glided like a sinuous serpent through the trees.
But he strove to put reassuring heartiness into his words when he answered. "Nonsense, Cora. You're just imagining things. It's—it's only the rustle of the wind over dried leaves." Then, with an explosive gasp of relief that was far more genuine, he cried:
"Look, darling, we're out of the woods! There's a clearing ahead. We'll find houses, people, help!"
Thank God! He had not realized how jittery he had been in that darkling, hemmed-in lane. Now let whatever it was dare to show itself in the revealing moonlight. He was not afraid any more.
The trees widened before their breathless progress, and then, suddenly, they were on an upland clearing. Cora shrank against her husband with a startled, "Oh!" Her slender form, snug in a mud-splashed traveling suit, trembled with apprehension. For a moment, Dan's spine was a rigid, ice-covered ramrod.
A dead moon flooded an eerie village of the dead with frozen light. White-glowing, phosphorescent teeth seemed to jut from the gaping maw of some monstrous beast. A dank, miasmic vapor swirled low over broken, weather-worn tombstones. It ebbed away momentarily to disclose the flaunting marble of a new stone and the turned earth of a freshly-made grave under which an unquiet body had not yet had time to find surcease and rest. Then the haze billowed away in a solid, clinging sheet again.
Dan exhaled his withheld breath and laughed shakily. The laugh sounded hollow and strained even to himself. "It's only a cemetery, Cora. No one there can harm you. They've been peacefully dead a long time."
Cora's shriek gashed through the deathly silence like a saber thrust. Her terror-strong fingers gripped desperately on her husband's arm; her face was a ghastly blur of fear.
"Oh, God! Dan, look!"
Dan spun on his heel, peering in the direction Cora pointed, rigid as if in a vise. Merciful Heavens! For a moment he swayed in sheer, unbelieving horror. His skin was a strangling encasement, squeezing his body until he could not breathe. Leaping blood roared and pounded in his ear drums. What in the name of God was that?
The ghastly exhalation of cemetery dew had lifted. And with it, seeming to rise from the unplumbed depths of the fresh-covered grave itself, like an evil incarnation, was a white-clad figure like a resurrected corpse!
THE pallid moonlight swathed the eerie apparition in an aura of moldering phosphorescence, emphasizing in fiendish detail the long, trailing dress that seemed to merge into the plucking grave beneath. Icy horror whistled through Dan's veins, jerked the breath from his stiffened lips. Cora's limbs were numb with terror, her eyes wide and staring.
The apparition was dressed in a bridal gown! A corpse-bride had risen from her rendezvous with death!
How long they stood in frozen immobility Dan was never to know. Nightmare paralysis held their fainting limbs rooted to the ground for a timeless eternity.
Then the Thing that was the bride of Death seemed to flow toward them. Its face, dim beneath a filmy, frozen veil, was ghastly white, its eyes black, burning pits in a hell of agony. It lifted its corpse white arm, pointed with accusing finger directly at the fear-rooted pair.
"Dead! Dead! Dead!" Like hammer blows the dreadful, toneless accents fell on their reeling senses. Then the arm swung down, and a shrieking, bubbling laugh came from its throat. It rose in soulless horror until air and earth and sky were a welter of demoniac sound, piercing their ears with unbearable agony. Still shrieking, still laughing with the dreadful emptiness of the grave, the white-swathed creature flowed without seeming motion—closer, ever closer!
Something snapped inside Dan, released him from his gripping panic. He caught his fainting wife by the arm; he jerked her along the muddy road with all the force of his jittering muscles. They ran, headlong, blindly, up the winding road, up to the brow of the hill, panting, breath spasmodic in their nostrils, goaded on to draining new spurts by the ceaseless, hideous laughter that swelled out behind them.
At the top of the slope, the road dipped sharply, down into a cupped valley. It was like a saucer bowl, bright and clear-etched under the white mockery of the moon. Cubes of solid blackness were scattered through the frost-white fields, clustered in ominous, serpentine masses along the central dip of the road. No light broke the grim, looming bulks, no stir of motion anywhere showed that life pervaded the sheeted valley.
Dan and Cora flung themselves down the sloping lane with desperate, racing feet. As they dipped over the bulge of the hill, the unhuman shrieking choked off abruptly, as if a skeleton hand had thrust out of the grave to drag back its escaped occupant. Silence blanketed the earth, broken only by the thud of their feet, the stertorous whistling of their tortured lungs.
Dan caught his wife just as she stumbled in blind, fainting weariness. Manhood, reason, came back with the cessation of that dreadful laugh. He felt ashamed of himself for having run, yet... what terrible warning for them did that bride of the grave portend? Why had the lurking presence pursued them through the woods until they reached its home in the village of the dead?
He shivered, tried to speak lightly. The broken gaspings of his spent energy made the effort a hollow japery: "You've married a brave husband, Cora," he said with a tight grin. "Imagine running away like that from some poor lunatic of a girl who happens to roam the fields at night."
Cora tottered with fatigue. Her sweet, finely chiseled face was pale as death, and fear brooded in the dark blue depths of her eyes. A shudder went rippling down her slender form.
"She was no creature of this earth, Dan," she whispered. "She came from the grave—to warn me. Don't you see? She was a—a bride too! Oh Dan," she wailed and clung to him, "I'm terribly afraid! I know something dreadful is going to happen!"
He stroked her arm tenderly. Even through the tweed cloth of her coat it was icy cold. "Please!" he begged. "Don't give way to nerves. There's nothing to be alarmed about. We're almost in the village. We'll find someone to fix our car. We'll go on, and forget about it all."
But inside, he knew instinctively that they were not through, that Cora's premonitions were correct. The wind of impending evil moaned through his body, and stifled the beating of his heart.
THE first house of the straggling street loomed in front of them. Its two squat stories crouched low to the ground like a stretched-out, tense cat motionless before a mouse-hole. A single, yellow streamer of light glared out at them like a baleful eye. It was deathly silent under the frosty moon.
Dan forced cheerfulness. "Here we are, dear," he said. "Looks like a hotel. That means our troubles are over."
Cora shrank back. She stared at the sprawling house with the fixity of a somnambulist. "Dan, dearest," she cried. "I feel something evil in there, something that is reaching out, dragging me down!"
Her husband said half-angrily: "Now you are giving way to your nerves! It's a commonplace country hotel with normal, usual people inside." He himself had felt the same stealthy flow of malign influence emanating from the house, but because he was a man—and a practical, hard-headed engineer to boot—he refused to yield to his shrieking instincts. Besides, a stealthy glance down the single, darkened street of the village had shown no other signs of life.
He rapped boldly on the door. A thin edge of yellow light knifed from under the door-sill. The abrupt knocking made thudding reverberations in a cavernous interior. A confused mutter of voices stilled suddenly. Deep, breathless silence lay like a pall, as if the inmates were crouching inside, waiting... waiting...!
Cora cried out again: "Let's go on, Dan! To the next village, anywhere...!"
Because he felt the same half-angry, inward urge, he pounded again, furiously. "Open the door!" he shouted.
This time there was movement. From inside came the sound of a slow, dragging shuffle. The door opened wide slowly, complaining stridently on its ungreased hinges.
Deep, yellow radiance flooded out into the night, scattering the silver phosphorescence of the moon. A man stood silhouetted in the doorway, peering out at them with shaded eye.
"What ye want, strangers?" he demanded. His voice was deep and harshly forbidding.
"We want to get in," Dan answered angrily. He resented the man's tone, the fact that he blocked the entrance with his huge body. He was not afraid of anything mortal, anything formed of flesh and blood. Not like the shadowy Thing of the cemetery that... He forced himself back to the business at hand. "Our car broke down about three miles back. We'd like to have it fixed, and incidentally, to get something to eat. This is a hotel, isn't it?"
"Yeah," the man growled, after a perceptible pause. "Ye might call this a hotel; leastwise as much as ye kin find in Malbone. But thar ain't no one kin fix your car till mornin'. Jeff, the mechanic, don't live in the village." And still the big man made no move to get out of the way.
Cora clung to her husband, whispering very low: "Please Dan, lets go on. I don't like his looks."
But Dan snarled in his throat, like a thoroughbred meeting a strange, hostile dog. Very deliberately he moved forward.
"Come on, Cora," he whipped over his shoulder. "The gentleman's inviting us in."
Their unwilling host stepped back just in time to avoid being shoved out of the way. Dan followed into the room. His strong, reassuring grip held Cora tight.
The other man stood to one side, legs astraddle, rocklike, smoldering fury in his small, red eyes. He was a huge man and his face was craggy and dour. Flaming red hair made an uncouth thatch over beetling brows. His nose was red from much drinking. His great hands hung at his sides, clenched and knotted with veins. Red hairs made a furry surface of their backs.
Dan glanced swiftly around the room. It was low-ceilinged and timbered, dark with years of smoke and soot. The floor was strewn with dirty sawdust and there were several rickety round tables with straight-backed chairs set about them. At the farther end of the room was a shabby bar, cracked and filthy, with a fly-specked mirror behind it, flanked by a row of dirty, lusterless bottles and glasses.
A MAN sat in a corner, elbows propped on a table. A half-emptied glass of stale, flat beer stood in front of him. He stared at the intruders with sullen, glowering eyes. His frowsy face was dark with stubble, and black hair hung in a low mop over a sloping forehead.
"Ain't many nights you're lucky like this, Silas Benton, is there?" he said rustily, fingering his glass with dirty fingers and sidling his glance sidewise at Cora. The girl looked around the unattractive interior with a little shudder of repulsion. She pressed close to Dan for protection, like a timid, helpless creature.
"Shut your mouth, Mose Landy!" Benton growled. He turned to Dan, while his red eyes slithered covetously over the girl. "As long as ye're here, might's well take care of ye," he said ungraciously. "Kin give you supper."
"That's swell," Dan said with a heartiness he was far from feeling.
Benton seemed to be cook, waiter, and owner all in one. Long minutes passed before the thick, greasy food was slopped on thicker, greasier plates. The butter was rancid and the coffee tasted strangely bitter. Cora nibbled hesitantly at moldy bread and sipped the coffee. Dan was hungry, but even his strong stomach could not down much of the food.
While they were eating, the man called Landy hunched over his beer, watching them covertly from under his black, limp hair. He did not speak.
Dan shoved the last plate away with relief, looked up at Benton. The landlord seemed like a huge, red gorilla, bent slightly forward as if ready to drop on all fours.
"Have you a place for us to sleep tonight, until that mechanic of yours can get on the job?"
Benton let his reddish eyes shift to Landy. "Yeah," he said hesitantly, "I got a room, but..."
"But what?" Dan asked sharply as the man stopped.
"Well ye see, your wife mightn't like it. Last week a young gal, she died in that there room."
Cora lifted her lovely head. "Oh, the poor thing!" she breathed sympathetically. "What was the matter with her?"
Benton scratched his head and looked at Landy again. "Ain't rightly known," he confessed. "She jes' up and died, like."
The dark, frowsy man unfolded himself slowly from his chair. He was tall and lanky when he stood up. "Whyn't yuh tell folks the truth, Silas Benton?" he demanded harshly. He turned slowly to Cora. His eyes glowered stormily. "There was a curse on her." His gaze flickered, softened, and went hard again. "She was a brave gal, Alma was. She heerd of the curse that lay on Malbone, yet she fought agin it. She always said, with a toss of her pretty, little head: 'Mose, I ain't givin' in to this here superstition. The other poor gals, they all died natural-like, just like Missus Olmstead, millionaire Olmstead's wife, up there on the hill. It was just happenstance it was always on their weddin' nights. The man what marries me' says she, 'has gotta marry in Malbone, an' nowhere else. I'll show 'em there ain't anything in that curse!' "
"Yeah," Benton interrupted savagely. "Bein' as how you're tryin' to spoil trade for me, ye mought's well tell the rest. Alma, she died on her weddin' night, like t'others, right in that spare room of mine upstairs. It's still fixed up, with the trimmings an' everything, like it was when she died, ain't it, Mose?" He started to chuckle unpleasantly, while Dan felt a strange tightening sensation in his brain.
"Shut up!" Landy shouted furiously. "Course it is. I'm paying you for it, ain't I?" He swung on Cora, who shrank back with a little cry from his twitching, distorted countenance. "She was Alma Landy—my wife—that night, an' she died! Like all the others. I begged her not to do it; I begged her to come to the big town and marry me there; but she just laughed—An'—an'—" he was fumbling blindly for words, "now she's gone, and all I got's beer, an' Benton's rotgut, tuh drown my thinkin' in!"
Cora forgot her fears, moved with womanly sympathy toward him. But he was gone, slamming the outer door behind him with a crash.
Benton pointed significantly to his own fiery pate. "He's a bit cracked since it happened, but you ain't got no call to worry. The curse holds only for a weddin' night."
Dan sucked his breath in sharply. Maggots of dread started crawling in his brain. Drumming fingers played a devil's tattoo up and down his spine. Words burst in panting jerks from Cora's fear-stiffened lips:
"Why—why—it's our wedding night too!"
BENTON'S jaw sagged. His mouth gaped liked a slimy pit, disclosing blackened stumps of teeth. Dan arose. He would not stay in this place any longer. Better to take Cora out into the night, to trudge wearily to the next village, than...
The door swung open with a gust of air. A man stamped noisily into the room, shaking himself all over like a terrier which had scrambled out of a pool of water. He was small and wiry, and he carried a professional bag.
"Hello, Benton!" he greeted. "Just got through with Ma Hendricks, and thought I'd step in for a drink. Lord knows I need one. But the youngster's a fine, healthy, squalling boy, so I suppose it's... Hello!" The doctor's bright, snapping eyes and little trim Vandyke turned toward the young couple. "I see you've got visitors tonight."
He stuck out his hand in friendly fashion. "I'm Dr. Edward Corwin, the only medico for miles around. I bring them into the world and usher them out. Staying for the night, I hope?"
"Well," Dan hesitated. After all, it was hard, in the presence of this bustling man of science, to confess dread of an old woman's superstition. "I'm Dan Turner, and this is my wife, Cora. But—you see—that is—"
"Mose Landy scared 'em off with his wild talk of curses laid on Malbone," the landlord interjected venomously.
The doctor swerved on them. His eyes were unfathomably bright. "Poor Mose," he said softly. "Of course, he's a bit mad. But then Alma was a fine girl. You see, it all started when Marian Olmstead died three years ago. It was her wedding night, up there on the hill, in the French château that Richard Olmstead had transported brick for brick, from France. Olmstead's been nearly crazy from grief ever since. He loved Marian very much. There was a curse, he said, on the château, and he had brought it back to Malbone. The natives embroidered on the tale, and made it a legend to apply to any virgin on her wedding night." He stopped, seemed to weigh his words carefully. "There have been several deaths since, under similar circumstances. Unfortunate coincidences, you understand, not worthy of an intelligent man's belief. But no one, except Alma, has dared marry in Malbone for months."
Cora cried out wildly: "This is my wedding night, too, and I won't stay." She shivered as if with ague; her eyes glittered with strange lights.
Dan felt the doctor's slightly amused eyes on him. Some secret spring in him quivered in response to his wife's terror, but being a man, he dared not confess his dread. He looked steadily at Benton, the landlord, averting his eyes from Cora.
"Please prepare the room," he said. "My wife and I are sleeping here tonight."
"Oh!" Cora put her hand to her mouth, gulped, and said nothing more. Dan felt as though he had struck her brutally with his fist. He wanted to take her in his arms, and beg forgiveness; he wanted to tell her that they would leave this very instant. But the landlord's heavy feet were already clumping up the stairs, and Dr. Corwin smiled quietly:
"Nothing like meeting a man of sense, sir," he said. "And as for your charming wife, a little nightcap would help soothe her nerves." He went behind the bar, pulled out a bottle, filled three glasses with deft fingers.
"My own private stock that I keep handy. It's a Napoleon brandy, very old and very pale. Here's luck to the newlyweds."
He handed Cora a glass with a little bow, gave one to Dan, took one for himself. They clinked and drank. Dan smacked his lips. It was real cognac. It warmed his insides; he saw Cora flush a bit and lose the haunted look in her shadowed eyes.
Benton was clumping downstairs again, when the sound of an automobile careening down the road roared in their ears. It came to a grinding halt before the hotel; brakes squealed; a steel door slammed, and someone catapulted into the room. He was a haggard, gaunt-faced man with burning, bulging eyes in which mad little lights crawled. His clothes, though spattered with mud and disheveled as if they had been slept in, bore the unmistakable stamp of Savile Row and English tailoring.
THE man glared fiercely at Dr. Corwin. He seemed to see no one else in the room. "She's gone away again, Corwin," he wailed. His lean, clawed hands fluttered like reeds in a gale. "She's left me, like she always does."
Corwin spoke to him soothingly: "Now, now, Mr. Olmstead, please be calm. Explain yourself. Who is gone; who left you?"
The millionaire shouted insanely: "Don't be a fool, Corwin! I mean Marian, of course—my wife. Every time I try to hold her, to keep her with me, she slips away. This time she's gone—for good!"
His head dropped suddenly in his hands. Great dry sobs racked his gaunt frame.
Cora swayed to her husband. "Oh, my God!" she murmured. Dan felt his scalp freeze to his skull. Dr. Corwin said Mrs. Olmstead had died three years before; Landy and Benton had corroborated it. Yet here was Olmstead, speaking of her as if she were alive, as if she had run away.
The doctor's eyes snapped warning to their shocked senses. He walked over to the sobbing man, laid his hand on his shoulder. "All right, Mr. Olmstead. I'll find Marian for you. Come; we'll search for her together!"
The millionaire raised his head eagerly. He seemed like a man reprieved from Hell. "You mean that, Corwin?" he cried. "You'll find her...?"
"Of course I shall," the doctor assured him, pushing him gently through the door. He turned, shrugged his shoulders slightly to the couple. "I've got to humor the poor fellow," he stage-whispered. "He has some queer delusions."
Then he was gone. A moment later they heard the motor of the automobile roar into vibrant life; then the grinding of gears, and the slither of sand beneath turning wheels.
Benton, the landlord, paused at the foot of the stairs. His red eyes slid past Dan and Cora, stared with poisonous intensity at the closed portal through which Olmstead and Corwin had departed. His craggy, red-mottled face was twisted in hate.
He caught Dan's surprised glance on him, and a veil dropped over his eyes.
"Yuhr room is ready, mister," he muttered.
Cora leaned heavily on her husband. She yawned. "I—I feel sleepy, Dan, dearest," she confessed.
Slowly they went up the creaking steps. A single Delco bulb made dim illumination in the hall. At the farther end, to the left, was an open door.
Benton grumbled: "That's your room. The other doors just lead into spare rooms with old junk an' the like. Ain't had much call for roomers since..." He checked himself. "Good night! Hope ye enjoy your weddin' night in Alma Landy's bed." And he withdrew, silent now, like a cat, in his tread, chuckling and mumbling to himself.
Dan stared around. Tiny, prickling feet seemed to have made a playground of his skin. In this very room, a young girl had died on her honeymoon night. And he had been fool enough to bring Cora to this rendezvous with death, simply because he had been afraid of a stranger's scorn.
It was pathetic, that room, yet subtly ominous. The old-fashioned four-poster bed was covered with a garish, red, rayon coverlet; the vanity bureau was brave with cheap, ornate toilet articles, in flowered imitation ivory—the very things to delight the heart of a country girl. Nothing had been touched since that fatal night; even the palpably new lace nightgown hung pathetically on a hook near the bed.
Dan shivered and started slowly to undress. He wished the night were gone already, that they were far away from Malbone, with the morning sun clear and shining with ghost-dispersing rays. Cora was unaccountably quiet. She yawned again and sat heavily on the bed. Her tweed coat was off and she fumbled with clumsy-seeming fingers at the hooks of her dress.
"Tired, darling?" Dan asked tenderly.
Her lovely face had dark shadows on it. Her eyelids drooped. "I—I don't know..." she started, and then her voice trailed off.
DAN looked up quickly from his chair. He was unlacing a shoe. It was then that he saw the framed picture on the vanity. It stood at an angle, away from the door, and the dim-burning Delco bulb in the nearer corner barely illuminated it. There was something familiar about the young girl whose photograph it was, something familiar about her...
Dan stood up quickly. He forgot about Cora's tiredness. He forgot everything but one pulsing thought. He must see that picture at close range; he must rid himself of that terrible suspicion before it grew on him.
In one bound he was at the vanity, had swept the frame into a violently trembling hand. Cora jerked her sleepy head erect. There was a puzzled, strained look on her face, as if she were savoring some nauseous concoction.
Dan's breath came in whistling gasps. His hand seemed frozen to the picture, yet it burned, like searing hell-fire, in his grasp. Stark, ravening horror exploded in his brain. His limbs seemed poured into an unyielding mold. "Merciful God!" he whispered through locked teeth, over and over again.
Cora forced herself from her stupor. The pallor of her face had deepened; there seemed to be no blood behind its translucent white.
"What—what's happened, Dan?"
His eyes burned into the picture. "This—this—!" he mouthed thickly.
It was a quite innocuous photograph. A young girl, fairly pretty, with sweet, somewhat irregular features and wide, dark eyes, dressed in a long trailing bridal gown and a veil to match. Evidently Alma Landy had posed before an itinerant photographer on her wedding morning, blushing with happiness, not realizing then the doom that was soon to overtake her.
"This girl—Alma Landy—" Dan said slowly, "who has been dead and buried for a week, is the Thing we saw in the cemetery!"
The light from the single bulb seemed suddenly shadowed over with leering, glowering shapes. The room swirled with stealthy movement. Unnamable Things closed in on two terrified mortals, baleful eyes gloating with horrid expectation.
Dan could feel the slow motion of his sluggish blood as it forced its way reluctantly through his clabbered veins. His head was sizes too small for his bursting brain. It was impossible—it was incredible—yet he knew his eyes had not deceived him. The dead girl had risen from her new-made grave, had cried out in unhuman accents: "Dead! Dead!" She had writhed with strange, unearthly laughter. God in Heaven! He felt his overtaxed brain slipping, going mad...
He whirled feverishly on his wife. The damning picture dropped with a thud from nerveless fingers. "Cora!" he cried, "Dress again! We must get out of this place. Now, this very minute! Do you hear?" He stopped abruptly. "Good God, Cora! What's the matter?"
His wife was swaying slowly. Her hand clutched spasmodically at her bosom; her breath came in loud, sucking gulps; there was strained agony on her clammy face. "Water, for the love of God!" she moaned. "I'm burning up, inside. Water!"
She sank across the bed, her limbs twitching and writhing.
"Cora!" Dan's shout was almost a scream. He raced to her side, jerked her face around. "Cora, darling, what ails you? Don't—don't! Cora, I implore you—!" His voice was a blur of tears.
Cora's eyes were dark with pain, unseeing; her bosom rose and fell with the thudding rapidity of a trip-hammer, she clutched at her heart as if she would tear it out. "Water, please!" The words issued barely audible from her pain-twisted lips.
Dan sprang up. "Of course! At once, immediately! Wait for me! I'll get you water, everything!"
His voice was an anguished wail as he flung himself out of the thick-shadowed room, raced with insane speed down the hall, cleared the narrow staircase in two breakneck bounds, smashed through the taproom. The blood seemed to spurt like a millrace from every pore, his ears roared with crashing thunder; his brain was a molten furnace.
His blindly stumbling feet lashed at the bar; his trembling hands fumbled over the glasses and bottles. Glass crashed to the floor with explosive sounds.
"Say, what's goin' on in here?"
It was Benton's voice, harsh, demanding. Dan turned his fear-frozen face toward the landlord. "My wife," he whispered—funny how his voice had failed him, "she's sick. She wants water. But don't think..."
Benton jerked toward the bar. His reddish, crag-hard features were masked with terror. "God, another one!" he stammered.
He snatched up a bottle, yelled: "Come on!" and was bounding up the stairs. Dan raced after. The water would bring her to—he was sure of that—yet dreadful fear climbed the stairs with him.
They burst into the bridal room with a thunder of noise. But no answering sounds greeted them. The air was thick with mocking presences. The prone figure on the bed was still.
"Cora!" The cry was a bayonet thrust through the silence. Dan hurled himself toward the bed, caught a still shoulder, shook it frantically. His wife's dear, pale head bobbed with the motion, fell back limply. Her eyes stared without focus at him, at the walls of the room, whichever way her body was turned. They refused to close.
The landlord sucked his breath in noisily. His red hair bristled, his bulbous nose twitched. He stared at the useless bottle in his hairy hand.
"I'm afeared, Mr. Turner, it ain't no use. The curse of Malbone—it's laid on her, too."
Dan jumped to his feet. His eyes glared, his face was that of an old man. "It can't be," he panted. "She's alive, man! She just—just fainted. Get a doctor, quick, do you hear?"
Benton backed away from him as from a crazed maniac. "Sure," he agreed hurriedly. "I'll get Doc Corwin on the 'phone this minute."
Out in the hall, he lifted the receiver, turned the crank three times. There was low-voiced conversation while Dan clung close to his wife's body, gulping great sobs.
DR. CORWIN put his stethoscope away, straightened up, and said gravely:
"There's no question about it, Mr. Turner. Your poor wife is dead. Heart's stopped, eyes turned up, limbs already setting in rigor mortis."
Dan listened dully. He had known it all the half hour it took Corwin to get there, even though his reeling mind had refused to admit it.
In a blur, he heard Corwin give directions to Benton, the landlord, for laying out the body; tearless, moveless, he had seen the poor remains of the girl he loved taken out of the room by men who seemed to have appeared from nowhere. Without knowing that he had seen, he noted the quick sidelong glance the red haired landlord had thrown him as he departed with the body. Dr. Corwin was trying to console him. Still in a haze, he heard the meaningless words. Then they suddenly made sense, pierced the aching void of his mind.
"Of course, as a man of science," the doctor was saying carefully, "I don't believe in the efficacy of a curse, or in ghostly apparitions. But the death of your wife, following on the strange and unaccountable deaths of every other woman who married and spent her honeymoon night in Malbone, that is—since Marian Olmstead collapsed in her husband's arms—well—" he laughed a bit sheepishly, "it does begin to lend color to legend. But then again, it may be some new type of virulent disease. It may be your wife handled some article of Alma Landy's, and was immediately infected. I would suggest," he went on gravely, "that your wife be buried at once, in order that the infection, if that's what it is, may not spread."
Dan raised his haggard face. He glared at the doctor. "I won't permit it!" he shouted. "Not in that cemetery—not in that—!" He stopped short, suddenly.
Corwin had misunderstood his broken words. The doctor shrugged. "I understand," he nodded. "You have a plot near the city, where..."
But Dan had jerked to his feet. He had forgotten. Cora's death had driven every other thought out of his head. His hand shot out and gripped the little doctor's shoulder in a death-like clutch. Alarm sprang into Corwin's eyes. Words were tumbling hot, stammeringly from Dan.
"That cemetery, Doctor!" he exclaimed. "There's something hideously wrong up there."
Corwin thrust off his hand, came up standing. "What do you mean?"
"I mean—I saw Alma Landy coming out of her grave, dressed in her bridal gown!" A twitch of fear made a spasm across his suffering mouth. "It was just before we came down into the village..."
The doctor stared into his eyes as if to detect symptoms of madness.
"I'm not crazy," Dan expostulated earnestly. "We both saw her, Cora and I. Would to God I had taken that warning; Cora wanted to flee this place! But I, fool that I was..." He broke off, choked and went on again. "I saw her photograph up in the room. I couldn't have been mistaken."
Bright pinpoints of flame narrowed Corwin's eyes. He exhaled slowly. "So that's it, eh?" he said, very low. "I've suspected every now and then..." He interrupted himself, laid his hand on Dan's arm. "Listen, Turner, I'm going up to the cemetery now. Do you want to come with me?"
Dan steadied himself, every muscle tense and hard. "Yes," he said quietly. "Poor Cora is dead, but perhaps we can see to it that no one else ever dies from the curse."
"Good!"
They went down into the bar. Benton was nowhere in sight; the men who had laid out Cora's body were gone. The stillness of the grave overlaid the house, segregating it from the rest of the world. A light still burned dimly over the bar.
CORWIN jerked to a halt and gave a startled little cry. Dan staggered as if he had been struck. Words stuck in his throat, refused to come out. Only strangled sounds forced their way through.
The doctor said wildly: "Where is your wife's body? This is where she was, in that coffin. I saw them put her there, I swear it!"
There was no question about it; the coffin was empty. The plain pine casket yawned like an open grave, but its occupant was fled. Cora's body had disappeared!
Dan reeled with nauseating horror. Almighty God! Wasn't it enough that his wife of one day had died wretchedly, almost in his arms, without this dreadful vanishment? Was she also to become one of the undead, ghastly corpses who walked the fields and howled hideously to a death-cold moon? Horrid scraps of medieval lore churned in his frozen brain: young girls who died and sought living prey with white, tearing teeth; who sucked the blood...
Dan groaned and raced around the room, knocking tables and chairs into confusion and ruin. There was no sign of the pallid body anywhere. Corwin's face was a tight mask. His eyes snapped. "The pattern is fitting together," he rapped out tensely. "We've got no time to lose. Come on!"
Blindly, with leering fear gibbering in his skull, Dan followed the doctor into the moon-flooded valley. A roadster of expensive make stood in the road. They climbed in.
Like a startled whippet, the car roared up the hill road, mocking the echoes with its flight. Cold fury enveloped Dan. His hands balled into fists, his teeth gritted.
"Faster!" The single word whipped into the screaming wind. Ghosts, devils out of Hell, vampires, nothing could stop him now! Whatever dread ghouls had taken Cora's body—for whatever nefarious purpose—a grim, grief-maddened man had to reckon with now. The thoughts of Alma Landy's bridal corpse, wandering aimlessly and whimpering in the night, flayed him like raking spurs in gashed flanks.
Corwin accelerated the machine. "Got a gun?" he yelled over the roar of the motor, the howl of the wind.
Dan looked down at his fists, and shook his head.
"That's a pity," the doctor shouted. "But I have one."
The long road fled beneath them. They mounted the brow of the hill and screeched to a halt beside the abode of the dead. They flung themselves out, staring.
The white, clammy mist still lay like a corpse-shroud on the gruesome ground. Grey headstones glimmered with pale phosphorescence through the hoary smoke. Farther along the crest of the hill, grim battlements rose, silhouetted blackly against a low-hanging moon. Without being told, Dan knew it was the transported château of the millionaire, Olmstead.
He heard the doctor's low gasp and whirled.
Dim through the mist, rising from behind the headstone of Alma Landy's grave, was a shapeless figure. Evidently it had not seen them, for it crouched over the piled-up earth. Its long, clawed arms rose and fell like pistons. Something broad and dull of hue made regular thudding sounds in the soft loam. A whining, whimpering noise emanated from the engrossed creature.
Dan growled in his throat. Icy sweat trickled down his spine. Ancestral fears raised the hair at the back of his neck, made his heart a pounding, lashing dynamo. What manner of beast was this Thing that delved feverishly at the dead of night in new-dug graves?
Corwin moved away like an eerie shadow through the moving haze. Dan shook off his clamping terror, lunged after the doctor. His knee crashed into a sunken gravestone. A sharp, involuntary yell rasped from his throat.
The dim-seen ghoul started up violently. The instrument in its hand dropped with a clang of metal against bare stone. It whirled and black eyes glared hideously at them.
Orange flame stabbed the fog at Dan's side, and a shattering roar crashed in his ears. The figure leaped sideways into the enveloping vapors, just as another bullet smashed viciously through the night. A hideous, cackling laugh floated back over the cemetery. Then both sound and form, vanished abruptly.
Dr. Corwin pocketed his pistol regretfully. "Missed him both times," he breathed. "I'm getting old."
But Dan had seen something. It was incredible, hideous in its implications. He whirled on his companion, breathing rapidly. "Do you know who that ghoul was?" he asked.
Corwin shook his head. "No. Why?"
"I recognized him when he looked up. I couldn't ever mistake those eyes, or that mop of hair. It was Mose Landy!"
The doctor's body jerked as if he had been shot. He caught Dan's arm with surprising strength. "Are you sure?" he hissed between tight teeth.
"Positive!"
Corwin released his grip. His eyes narrowed. He nodded his head. "That explains things! Alma brought several thousand dollars with her. Mose did away with her, kept the money. Now he's afraid of an investigation, and came here to snatch the body." The doctor started to run. "Come on. Let's see what he's done."
A moment later, they stood in amazed silence before the grave. It had not yet been opened. Only a few shovelfuls of dirt had been turned over. The discarded spade lay where it had fallen.
Corwin snuffed the air like a bird dog. "That means we got here in time," he declared exultantly. "Mose intended to bury a body, not to remove one! God knows what hideous uses he can have for the newly dead. Perhaps he dragged your wife's body up here also, and we scared him away before he was able to conceal it."
Back and forth they tramped, seeking their gruesome evidence. Dan's thoughts whirled in a blaze of agony. Pray God he would find Cora's corpse before it was subjected to unspeakable atrocities. At least she should have the cold comfort of a quiet, unmutilated burial. As for Mose... his hands clenched tightly as if already they gripped that long, thin neck between them.
The doctor's sudden call broke the bitter spell of his reeling mind. "Here she is! Look!"
Dan dashed through the mist toward the bending figure. Dread tugged at his racing feet, tried to hold them back. He was ghastly afraid of what he would find. Perhaps Mose had already worked his mysterious atrocities on Cora!
He burst upon the stretched-out figure in an agony of mingled impatience and fear. He looked down with hazed eyes. The mist cleared as if icy water had been dashed over his head. He uttered a horrified exclamation.
The prone body was that of a girl, but her head was a dreadful, gory thing. It had been battered into a shapeless pulp, under the impact of furious blows. A long, mud-covered, blood-soaked bridal dress clung in pathetic folds to her twisted limbs.
"Only a fiend could have vented his rage on a dead body like this," the doctor muttered somberly.
But Dan did not hear him. He bent over the poor, mangled corpse, fighting his shuddering repulsion. He sucked in breath with volcanic force. His limbs stiffened.
"Dr. Corwin," he cried in strained horror. "This is not my wife's body. It's Alma Landy. But this blood is fresh! Alma Landy was not...!"
A shadow fell menacingly across white headstone and ground. It was elongated, distorted, and something blurred was in its upraised hand.
Dan came up with a rush from his knees, whirled. At the same time he heard Corwin's voice, loud with warning:
"Look out, Turner!"
It was as if the sky had fallen with blinding force on the top of his head. He sagged, legs turned suddenly to jelly. As he crashed headlong to the ground, he heard, faintly, as from a great distance, the sounds of struggle, and Corwin's pistol emitting quick explosions. Then everything became silent and black as the grave.
CORA TURNER opened her eyes slowly. They did not seem to belong to her. Neither did her limbs. She felt strangely dissociated, as if each leg and arm were floating independently in space, buoyant in a warm, vaporous mass. Her head was light and hollow, and her skull seemed an expanding sphere in which her thoughts turned constantly without volition.
Was she dead, perhaps? The thought did not shock or surprise her. She remembered the past vaguely—that long dead past when she was alive, a human being with warm emotions and mortal fears. It seemed eternities ago.
The bridal chamber, her sudden sickness, the anguished face of her husband. Poor Dan! Was he still alive, or was he also in this limbo of forgotten things, floating in midstream alongside of her?
Then there was the queer look on Benton's face as he had stared down, water bottle in hand; the grave decision with which the doctor had pronounced her dead; her slow floating trip down into the narrow confines of the coffin, while she lay frozen, immobile. She had wanted to laugh loud into the startled faces of those strange humans who had carried her. They had thought her dead. She had laughed at that—inwardly. In truth they were mere shadows, while she...
Then she could remember no more, until now, as her eyes were slowly, volitionlessly opening. She stared around with a puzzled frown. She was not in boundless space. She was within the strait confinement of four somber walls. Blackness crowded all around her, streaked with leaping, frozen fires. Deep red they were, straining through the impenetrable murk, yet curiously immobile, as if they were painted on a dead-black background.
A blood-red glow, seemingly sourceless, pervaded the place, bathed her limbs in eerie light. She looked down and saw her body. It was whole, not scattered and floating, as she had thought; and it was reclining on a soft, red-covered couch.
Her eyes turned again, as if on frictionless bearings. Against the wall farthest from her, a brazier cast up purplish flames. They were alive, those flames, not frozen like the ones on the walls. They sputtered and cast an eerie radiance, they danced and leaped with fiendish glee. Iron tongs and curious pincers shimmered with white-hot incandescence in the shallow, blazing dish. Her eyes kept on turning. They fastened on a strange device that seemed riveted to the floor. It was an oblong, ebon frame, with a fixed, black bar at one end and a bar on rollers at the other. Pulleys, ropes and levers made a complicated array.
Something stirred within her. She felt her eyes go wide. Her limbs seemed to float back from the outer space, to coalesce with a dull thud. Her body was suddenly heavy, compact; gelid, loathsome things seemed to pound with thumping tread inside her skull. Had she not been dead, she would have been sure she was mortally afraid.
A black figure that had been invisible against its ebon background flowed forward into the range of her straining sight. It was tall, enveloped in a dun, light-quenching shroud. A hooded cowl covered its head. It had narrow slits through which gleaming, fierce eyes burned into her very deadness, shriveling her soul with piercing heat.
A faint shriek wrenched from Cora's suddenly constricted throat. It hurt as it rasped its way out. A lump that had been lifeless and sodden within her bosom jerked piston-like with furious pumpings. Her heart? Then... then... she must be alive... she must be...!
TONELESS, hollow words issued from behind the muffling cowl. They sounded like the pronouncements of another world.
"Cora Turner! You are dead... dead... dead!"
There was a dreadful finality to that grim reiteration. Cora felt mad poises beat with agonizing thunder through all her body. Surges of rushing pain swept over her in waves. Her skull, hitherto a vast empty universe, contracted until it squeezed her throbbing brain and her twisting thoughts, into a crushed, pulped mass. Even so had Alma Landy, a corpse arisen from her bridal grave, shrieked out: "Dead! Dead! Dead!"
"No! No!" Cora wailed. "I am not dead! I am alive—still alive! I feel pain; my heart is beating; I am afraid. Look!" she cried frantically, in mad attempt to convince herself, "I can move my limbs. The dead can not do that; they must lie in their graves, rigid, frozen!" Her eyes widened in ravening horror; they seemed forced out of their sockets.
For, in spite of straining muscles, in spite of fear-spurred willing, her limbs still lay stiff and unmoving on the couch. It was then that Cora realized that they had not budged from their position since she had awakened to awareness. Even her lips spilled out speech without motion.
The ebon figure said inexorably: "Cora Turner, you are dead! You died in Malbone ages ago. You died of a curse that first was laid on Marian Olmstead. Your corpse was placed in its straitened coffin, and buried beneath moldering earth. Obeying immutable laws, it has come at last to this limbo of the dead. You must not fight your doom. Never again will you live or breathe the air of humankind."
Cora felt hideous fear overwhelm her, freeze the pounding blood into gelid ice. Great God! Was it true what the shrouded being was saying; were such things possible? Her limbs were gripped in a nightmare mold; the coffin had been a damnable reality. Was then the evidence of her heart and her throbbing pulse but vain illusion?
Yes, yes, they must be! See, they had stopped now; she could not move or budge an inch. Her very thoughts slowed to a crawl, as if they were flies pushing gluey legs through an endless ocean of molasses. Soon they too would stop, and then... She tried to shriek, and only the faintest of far-off noises issued.
"See," intoned the figure inexorably, "you realize it now. You will not struggle any longer against your doom. You are dead and your soul is ready to leave its worthless corpse untenanted."
For the first time, it seemed to her dazed, reluctant brain that there was a hint of warmth, of avid eagerness in that hitherto toneless, unhuman voice.
The dun figure glided to the brazier. He lifted his shrouded arm and a fine dust sprinkled downward into the glowing embers. At once a ghastly, violet light leaped in forked spires into the room, like the twin writhing horns of Satan. A violet haze spread slowly outward. The haze entered Cora's quivering nostrils, penetrated her sluggish dying brain. Her feeble thoughts blurred into a fainting drowsiness. She tried to close her eyes against the hooded figure, against the room and its devilish implements, but they were fixed in frozen wideness.
The black creature turned to face her. He lifted his arms high, and the ebon garments draped in sinister folds. The walls, the moveless flames, made a depthless background.
"Come down, O spirit of Marian!" he cried. "Descend from your empty tenements and enter the death-fixed, desireless body of this maid. Force out her reluctant, earthbound soul and breathe the infusion of your own warmth into her limbs." His voice rose to a mad screech, full-bodied, terrible.
"Do you hear me, bride of a single night? For years you have hovered in this place of haunts and vengeful ghosts; for years you have clamored ceaselessly for form and human substance once again; for years you have made a nightmare hell of my sleep, whispering urgently in my ear by day. I have furnished you with maidens one after another. I have plucked new-made brides from the very sides of gaping husbands; I have killed and tortured time and again in obedience to your commands, furnishing you with the bodies of virgin maids on their wedding nights, such even as you possessed that night three years ago. Yet you refuse my offerings always; you do not return to me. Why? With Alma Landy I thought I had succeeded; I thought I saw that quiver round her lips that only you possessed; then—somehow—she escaped from under my hands." His speech was insane now, wildly horrible.
"This time, my Marian, you must come!" He was tossing his hands in frantic motion. "This time... ah!" His voice muted to straining, frightened whisper. "This time—you—have—come! Forgive!"
TO CORA, suspended in a timeless void, it seemed in very truth that Marian had come. The haze before her terror-chilled eyes swirled in malignant spirals. Fetid presences seemed to stream from the depthless walls and join the mad rout of leaping vapors. Her fear-crazed brain sensed forms and shapes, and then—oh, God!—shadowy wisps of mist, horribly like slimy tentacles, unearthly violet in hue, groped toward her. Behind them, grinning, mocking, were the tremulous lineaments of a face—a woman's hate-filled face! Large saucers of smoke, pigmented like glaring eyes, poured venom into her shrinking, failing mind. The tentacles reached out—they were clawed in needle-like streamers—winding around her throat... Cora tried to shriek and could not. Her throat was in a tight, constricting noose, her body bathed by a sear of fire. Something was slipping from her... she was fainting, going far away while those frightful eyes poured into her body... Help!... Help!
Knock! Knock! Dull thudding of fate!
The dreadful phantasm seemed to rush away from her with a thin gibbering cry, and became, once more, a swirling of violet fumes from a purple-flamed brazier. The mad, screeching figure lowered its writhing arms with a jerk, cried out in sharp annoyed accents:
"Who's there?"
Cora's sense slowly returned. Her body was once more solid reality. A slow flow of warmth released her ice-bound blood, sent it pulsing sluggishly through unresisting veins. That voice! She recognized it now.
Richard Olmstead, the mad millionaire! Mad—insane from years of brooding about his wife, Marian, who had died mysteriously on her wedding night. But he was a human being, alive, not a devil or creature of the void!
Something creaked, like a panel sliding open stealthily. There came a thud of feet, the sound of a heavy body dragging laboriously over the floor. A voice spoke, panting from exertion; masked, yet somehow familiar. She had heard that voice before.
"Here he is! Had a hard time getting him—at the cemetery."
"Good!" Olmstead's shrouded figure faced to the left. "How about the other one?"
"Got away. Sorry, but..."
The mad millionaire flung his arms up in a terrible, wrathful gesture. "Sorry!" he raged. "That means a lot, you fool. That other was more important than this blundering nincompoop. He knows more. He's dangerous, I tell you, to both of us, and you tell me you're sorry!"
"I couldn't help it," the other said defensively. "But I'll get him surely next time."
"You'd better," Olmstead declared ominously. "You've muddled enough as it is. I was just getting her into shape for Marian's return—I felt her spirit hovering in the room—and you come knocking and pounding and scaring her away. Get that body over near the brazier!"
Cora tried frantically to move her head around. But the paralysis still held her. She was alive, she knew that now—but fear made a horrible seething hell of her brain. What more fiendish things were they going to do to her? Who was it they had captured out in the cemetery?
Another black-shrouded figure staggered across the room, carrying a dead, limp burden in his arms. He dumped it with a dull, cracking thud beside the avid saucer of fire. The flames flickered greedy tongues out toward the still, lifeless body.
Cora felt her lungs surge as a vast rush of air sucked through her throat—then out through suddenly unlocked lips again. A great quivering scream filled that chamber of death with frantic concussions of sound.
The pale, blood-streaked features of the fallen man, frozen in a deathlike mask, were the features of Dan, her husband!
The two shrouded figures whirled. Olmstead shrieked madly: "Dead! You are dead!"
CORA'S limbs were seething with re-leased blood. Her skull was a battleground of crazed grief and pulsing horror.
"I am not dead!" she shrieked frantically. "I never was. You drugged me, you fiends! You... oh, God! What have you done with Dan? Dan!" she implored desperately, hopelessly. "Speak to me! Tell me you are not dead!"
She flung all her screaming will into her legs. They moved! They thrashed weakly to the floor; they lifted her from the couch. She swayed with strange weakness; the room swirled round and round.
In three quick strides, Olmstead was upon her, had lifted her feebly struggling form in arms imbued with the strength of the insane. "You see what you have done, you idiot!" he ground out at his hooded companion.
The other sneered. His voice was muffled by the close-drawn hood. "You're crazy, Olmstead. I told you the last time all your mumbo-jumbo won't help. Marian is dead, and the dead don't return. Not even for you. I admit you've paid me plenty for what I've done, but the game is reaching the end. The one who got away tonight knows too much."
Olmstead snarled and swung the girl like a sack of coal. "You've taken my money and laughed behind my back, eh?" he thundered. "You think I'm a rabid madman—that Marian hasn't been talking to me day and night?" His voice became a terrible screech. "Well, I'll show you, damn you! You'll go down on your knees in groveling terror when Marian appears in this girl's body. Maybe I've used the wrong methods, but the rack will do the work. By all the devils in hell, I'll twist and stretch every limb of her stubborn body until her soul will shriek with hideous pain and flee her tortured form. Then you'll see Marian coming... you'll see... you'll see...!"
He hurled Cora down on the oblong frame, tore with frantic haste at ropes and levers. Strong hemp gouged into her legs and arms; her head went back with a thud.
"You'll see... you'll see...!" he mouthed in senseless iteration. He swung with clawed, griping fingers at a lever. There was a creaking noise, the sound of rollers turning.
Cora let out a wild scream of pure, unending agony. White-hot swords slashed through every nerve and muscle in her body; every bone seemed torn shrieking out of its socket.
"What did I tell you?" the millionaire yelled insanely. "She can't stand it! She'll get out and make room for Marian!"
The other figure stood a little to one side, watching. He said nothing, but his posture was one gigantic sneer of skepticism.
Olmstead swung the lever again. Another scream, wilder than the first, forced its way through Cora's bursting throat. Dear God! She couldn't stand this. The pain was beyond conceiving. She was a straining mass of stretched muscles, a bottomless pit of suffering. The clammy sweat crawled on her bloodless face; leering devils sat on her laboring bosom, crushed her with their infinite weight. God! If only she would faint, if only... And still the bar twisted under the implacable strain of ropes and levers, and her racked, bound form strained further and further.
The cowl had fallen away from Olmstead's face. It was a glaring, insane mask. Maggots of madness crawled in his eyes... gnawing worms to which no human pity could appeal.
Another mighty heave and Cora's tortured soul flooded out in a great welling cry that racketed from wall to wall. Blood dripped in a fiery curtain before her pain-hazed eyes; there were millions of bones in her tormented body, and each was a blazing focus of torment. She tossed her head from side to side in convulsive jerks.
A dim-seen form, sprawled on the floor, seemed to be lifting, like a shadow crawling up a wall, like a denser exhalation of mist from the ground. Now she was delirious. Soon she would be dead. She shrieked again.
The hazy figure seemed to stiffen under the impact of her cries. It rose up and up, swaying, tottering, forcing itself erect with fierce will.
Dan! Dan was risen from the dead, an avenging spirit, coming to rescue her from her bed of pain!
"Help, Dan, help!" she screamed.
Olmstead dropped the lever, whirled. The swaying form lurched forward, met the millionaire's mad rush with a bone-cracking thud.
The ropes slackened on Cora's limbs in blessed relief. A dull, strained ache succeeded the exquisite torture of dislocated limbs. The haze vanished from her eyes.
A furious struggle was taking place in the center of the room. She saw Dan's face, streaming blood, startlingly white against the red; she saw his fist lash out, sink thudding into Olmstead's body. In dreadful agony, she beheld the millionaire stagger, come back with a mad whirling rush, clawed fingers damping viciously around her husband's throat. Deeper, deeper, sank those steel-hard fingers. Dan choked and gagged, and the death mask of his face turned a horrible, mottled blue. His own hands fluttered vainly, trying to tear those throttling sinews from his neck.
Olmstead gloated: "This time I'll kill you myself. Then your wife. Everyone dies!" He laughed and his wild laughter filled the room with an ecstasy of madness.
"Dan, don't let him kill you!" Cora wailed. She thrashed against her ropes, heedless of the pangs darting through her wrenched system. Forgotten now were her own sufferings as she witnessed the man she loved being choked to death horribly. Her brain was a rocketing shower of stars. She would kill that madman with her own slender hands... if only she were free!
Dan seemed to hear her frenzied thrashings. He caught Olmstead around his waist, strained until his face gorged with suffused blood; heaved with all the dying strength of his pain-racked body.
There was a surprised howl, and the mad millionaire, fingers ripping from his victim's throat, went sailing through the misty air, to land with a horrible, crunching thud against the farther wall. He fell into a limp huddle of black, shrouding garments, out of which lolled a hideous, foam-flecked head.
Dan straightened slowly. Blood dripped from raking gashes in his throat; his face was still a queer, mottled mixture of red and ghastly blue. He had difficulty in sucking in enough air for his bursting lungs. The room swam in dizzying circles. But he tottered toward the rack, arms outstretched.
"Dan! Look out!" Cora's anguished warning pierced the veil over his eyes, brought him to a halt. The millionaire's companion, hooded and shrouded, was pointing the muzzle of a wicked-looking gun at his heart.
"Thanks, Turner," the masked figure mocked from within the muffling swathings of his hood. "You've saved me a lot of trouble. I intended to kill Olmstead anyway. He was a madman—a menace to society, as well as to me. It was getting too dangerous, catering to his fiendish delusions, even though I milked him for plenty. Now I can kill you, your wife, and everyone will think you fought it all out between yourselves. No one will suspect me."
His finger, hidden beneath black folds, pushed against the cloth. Dan knew that death was crouching to spring at him. A dull rage enveloped him. He heard Cora's despairing shriek. He lunged forward, hopelessly, knowing he could not reach the masked murderer before the bullet would tear through tissues and pulsing heart. Poor Cora!
A gun crashed with dreadful sound. Dan's shrinking flesh, in mid-leap, awaited the smashing impact of lead against bone, the blinding light, the enveloping blanket of death.
But nothing happened! His weak spring brought him sprawling halfway across the chamber. The shrouded figure tottered; the gun fell to the floor with a thud; a groan issued from unsealed lips. Then the man in black pitched headlong to the ground, arms spread-eagled and stiff.
Dan shook his head dazedly. What had happened? Why wasn't he dead, instead of the outstretched man? Cora was crying hysterically on the rack. Painfully, he went to her. Poor darling, she must be released; she must be hurried to Dr. Corwin for treatment; she...
"Got him just in time," a strange rough voice spoke. And still another grunted thickly: "Damn 'em both!"
Dan swayed around, and stared unbelievingly. From the black maw of the panel through which his inert body had been dragged, two men stepped. One held a still-smoking gun. They were Mose Landy, the bereaved husband, and Silas Benton, the red-haired inn-keeper of Malbone.
Landy said very bitterly: "I suspected Olmstead right away when Alma died right in my arms. He'd been cracked nigh three years an' he'd been talkin' pretty wildly. But I had no proof. Then, after I talked to you in Benton's Hotel, a funny thought struck me. It was crazy, but I wanted to test it out. I wanted to see if poor Alma's body actually was in her grave. I sneaked a shovel, an' was starting to dig when you came along. I had to run for it then." He shook his head mournfully, and a tear rolled down his frowzy cheek. "I ain't yet found out."
Dan said gently: "Your wife is—dead. I saw her body." He did not tell him that she had been killed only that night. There was no reason for further torturing the poor fellow. The blood oozing from her bashed head had still been warm and sticky when he had bent over her.
The frowzy man took a deep breath. "Let her rest in peace, poor thing," he said slowly. "Anyhow, what happened there in the cemetery gave me some more ideas. I hot-footed it back to Benton's. He heard my story, and he told me more things. So we determined to sneak into this here castle of Olmstead's. Close to here, we run into someone carrying a body. Just as Benton started to go for him, he disappeared, right into the ground."
"We waited a while an' followed him in. It's a tunnel, an'—well—you know the rest."
Dan nodded. "All except the identity of the fellow you shot."
Benton looked at him with a disgusted air. "Hell, that's easy!" he growled. He walked over to the shrouded corpse, ripped the cowl away. The thin ascetic face of Dr. Corwin stared sightlessly up at them. His Vandyke was still neat and dapper...
Dan told Cora the rest as he held her tight in his arms. "It was easy for Corwin to play the game. Perhaps he first instilled the idea into Olmstead's cracking brain; perhaps not. But he could get to the brides easily enough. The drink he handed you was already drugged. There are certain Indian concoctions that give the appearance of death—a state of suspended animation. As a doctor, he could declare the young girls officially dead. He hired men to dig the bodies out of their graves, and bring them here. The effect of the drug was only temporary. Alma must have gotten away somehow, and in her tortured, semi-stupefied condition, wandered the countryside. Olmstead almost exposed the whole plot when he rushed down madly, to tell Corwin the news. Corwin went out with him, you remember. He must have collected his men, found Alma, and killed her. Evidently he did not have time to hide the body. Then he hurried back to his house, waiting for the call he was sure would come announcing your death. His men lurked outside, kidnapped you from the coffin when he signaled them. That must have been after I refused to bury you here."
Cora shuddered in his arms. "It was an awful nightmare."
Dan's lips went to hers. "We'll have to start celebrating our honeymoon all over again, dear," he said.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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