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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Horror Stories, November 1935, with "Kiss Of The Iron Maiden"
In that grim mountain fastness which was inhabited by an eerie horde of depraved souls, Dan Kirkland went to build a road... How could he have fought off the mysterious power of Guy de Laval, master torturer, who spirited Dan's shrieking wife from his arms—and sent him into the lethal embraces of the Iron Maiden...?
THEY sat in a grim, tight circle around Dan Kirkland and his wife, Emma. They hunched forward in their chairs like gaunt birds of prey, brown, skinny hands folded immovably in their laps. Their eyes were black beads that glittered with evil hardness on the tense forms of their involuntary hosts. Not a word had they uttered since they had slunk into the house, one by one, uninvited guests, and ranged themselves with stealthy movements around the walls.
Dan Kirkland felt the skin prickle along his spine at their unwinking, silent regard. Emma's body, pressed close against his, was trembling. Her slender fingers, ordinarily warm and vibrant, were linked with his in icy coldness. He knew that she was afraid.
He shook off his own mounting premonitions of evil with an angry shrug. What was there to be afraid of? He had known when he had taken the job that the inhabitants of Montfaucon were a race apart, a section of decayed humanity on the sagging folds of the mountains. Strange and abominable were the tales that had filtered through the Great Smokies, of these inbred descendants of a little band of refugees who had fled the French Revolution. The mountaineers, rude and rough and superstitious, called the region accursed and its people creatures of hell.
Dan's troubled stare swept past their parchment faces and out through the window of the house that had been arranged for him by the National Construction Co. The sun was sinking in a blare of angry reds over the jagged peaks of the mountains. The long, narrow valley with its snake-like line of curious stone structures, lifted in precipitous ascent between frowning, unscalable cliffs to a triangular notch in the hills, and dropped in a long, invisible slope on the other side to the gentler rolling country beyond. It was the only cleft in the tumultuous heave of the Smokies, for a hundred miles. That was why Montfaucon had been chosen as the last link to be forged in the great transcontinental highway. That was why Dan Kirkland, young road engineer, was here in advance to determine gradients and map construction areas before the regular road gangs pushed painfully, through pathless forests and tangled gorges.
His eyes flicked angrily back to his strange, uninvited guests. Damn it! Why didn't they talk? Were they going to sit like that all night, unmoving, un-stirring, watching Emma and him with those bead-like, expectant eyes? What were they waiting for? In God's name what did they expect to happen?
He cleared his throat. For the third time he started: "I take it as a friendly gesture—your coming to see us like this. But—" His voice trailed off; he could not proceed. An impalpable hand seemed to have gripped him with invisible fingers and tightened his throat to a dry constriction. The words had fallen like leaden weights into the thick silence. No one spoke, no one moved. Perhaps they were dumb, Dan thought desperately.
Emma choked back a little cry. She could not stand their insupportable gaze any longer.
Then suddenly, a great, black-bearded man with a vulturish nose hunched forward. His too-red lips opened. His voice was like the creaking of a rusty gate.
"Go back!" he croaked.
Dan started and felt Emma shrinking closer to him. Words of warning...!
"What do you mean?" he demanded.
But the black-bearded man had subsided into his former torpor. Only his darting eyes gleamed malevolently. An old woman next to him, skinny and dried and sucking toothless gums with sagging lips, lifted shrill tones.
"Jean Ferron speak once. It is enough. I, Marie, his wife, tell you so. He say, 'Go back!' He is right!" A repulsive leer spread over her seamed countenance. "You and your pretty woman! Montfaucon ain't for you. Go back before it is too late!"
DAN'S eyes narrowed. He was beginning to smell the rat. They were trying to scare him off the job. That was it. He had heard some talk at headquarters before he had come. These incredible villagers, inbred to the point of imbecility—and inherited with madness—had resented the coming of the highway, even though ample sums had been offered for the land to be taken and the houses to be demolished.
"Now listen here," he started angrily...
But a ruddy-faced man with glossy black, pointed mustache and carefully combed hair sprang to his feet. His hand went up placatingly. He was the only one in all that weird and stealthy circle who seemed normal and human, who could have walked in the streets of any city without exciting undue attention.
"Please, Monsieur," he begged. Even his voice was liquid as old French, carefully cultivated. "I know what you are about to say. You are wrong. We of Montfaucon do not deplore the road you are about to make." An expansive smile broke over his mobile countenance. "Why should we, neighbors, hein? Ah! We get good round American dollars for our property, do we not?"
But no answering gleams illumined the dark and twisted faces of his fellow villagers. A gaunt, cadaverous man with red-rimmed eyes and implacable look spoke up: "That is all right for you, Henry Malmort. You always wanted to leave Montfaucon for that world beyond the mountains. Your house is in the very path of the road. You will get more money than any one else." The man swerved and stared hungrily at Emma's wistful loveliness, until she shrank from his reddish eyes and Dan bunched the muscles round his jaw into hard ridges. It seemed an effort for the man to shift his gaze to Dan.
"But it is not that," he went on harshly. "It is that you have your so lovely lady with you. Montfaucon is no place for lovely ladies. Jean Ferron and Marie were right. You must go back, at once!"
All around the hitherto silent circle a murmur of assent guttered in scrawny throats, grew in intensity until it was a weird, terrifying ululation. Like the howling of a far-off pack of wolves closing in on the kill. Even Dan, who had never known fear, felt the skin prickle on his body at that hellish sound of approval. Emma swayed to him. Her small, delicately curved lips were at his ear, whispering in quick gasps. "Dan! Dan! I'm afraid. These horrible creatures! Their warnings! Perhaps we'd better go now— now!"
He pressed her rounded arm reassuringly. "Don't worry, kitten," he whispered back. But his voice lacked its old confident ring. What the devil were they driving at? A cold wind swept with icy fingers over his brow. Those muttered horrors the blanched mountaineers had told him, when he had tried in vain to obtain guides, and which he had mocked at! Was it possible...?
Henry Malmort spoke up earnestly. His ruddy face was flushed. "Oliver Pornic, my friend," he said in shocked tones, "I am surprised. Is it not enough the ignorant imbeciles of the mountains narrate these terrible things of us; must we, too, believe them?"
Marie Ferron cackled with fiendish glee. "They're true, every word of them." Her eyes gloated strangely on Emma. "And you know it, Henry Malmort. Look!" She thrust out a skinny arm toward the open window that faced the upward sweep of the valley, and Dan and Emma turned involuntarily to follow her accusing finger.
The sun was a blood-red agony impaled on the craggy teeth of the topmost mountain. The notch in the hills was a river of scarlet fire. And there, half way up the precipitous slope, clinging to the ominous wall like a great bat, with black wings outspread, was what seemed to their startled gaze a somber château—a replica of the robber abodes of the great seigneurs of the Loire, in days long past. Its grey walls were blank and smooth, except where tiny, deep-set embrasures pricked out with the flames of the expiring sun. Then, even as they stared with fearful fascination, the bloody ball plunged behind the peak, and night swept with sable shrouds over the valley. The ominous castle was blanked out as if it had never been.
"The House of the Master!" the ancient hag intoned with head thrown back. She seemed to Dan suddenly like a witch with clawed fingers worshipping before the dread abode of Satan. "Le grand seigneur, Guy de Laval! He who brought our forefathers from la belle France to this valley of the damned." Her voice became shrill with mockery as she clawed feverishly around to Dan and Emma. "Ask him! Ask the master! He can tell you whether what they say is true! He can tell you why there are no pretty maids in Montfaucon; why only bags o' bones like me are left." Her eyes glittered on Emma. "Ask him, my dear. He will tell you. Ha! ha! ha! ha!"
HER laughter was like the rattle of pebbles in a dried gourd. It sent shivers up and down Dan's spine. He clutched his wife's hand fiercely. It was all nonsense, of course. Guy Laval! Why, he had letters of introduction to him from Dixon, the president of the company. "He can make your job easy or hard," Dixon had told him. "He runs the village; I might even say he owns it body and soul. He's the descendant of the aristocrat Laval, who brought his peasants along with him when the Revolution broke. Regular feudal stuff, I'm told."
Dan opened his mouth to say something, but Malmort was already on his feet. The ruddiness had gone from his cheeks. They were drained white as snow. His glossy mustache was a rigid, shiny rod. His eyes were haunted pools of fear.
"Marie, are you mad?" he mouthed. "The master has eyes and ears everywhere. If he should have heard..."
The crone collapsed like a pricked balloon. She groveled in her chair, the spittle drooling from her yellowed lips. "I didn't mean nothing, Master. I swear I didn't."
"This is nonsense," Dan said sharply. If these wretched creatures were trying to scare him away, he'd show them. "I have letters for Guy Laval. I intend seeing him tomorrow morning."
Oliver Pornic threw back his death's-head, and laughed. The horrible sound of his laughter thrummed a devil's tattoo along Dan's spine, brought a faint gasp of fear from Emma's pallid lips. The cadaverous man jerked his head forward, stopped his cackle abruptly. There was malice and strange mockery in his blood-red eyes. "You will not wait for morning to see the master. Tonight he will invite you to his castle." He nodded his head with gloating satisfaction. "You will go tonight, you and your lovely wife. Yes, the master likes pretty women."
Dan gritted his teeth and swayed forward. What did that smirking death's-head mean? His fist bunched involuntarily. But Emma was plucking desperately at his sleeve. "Dan!" she talked very low. "Take me away from these horrible people. Something's going to happen soon, I know it."
But even as he turned to her Jean Ferron croaked hoarsely. "What Pornic says is true. The master always invites strangers—and young girls. Mr. Kirkland, for the love of God do not go! Make an excuse or make no excuse, but do not go!"
There was no mistaking the desperate earnestness in his voice. His full-fleshed lips were quivering. His black beard waggled as though with palsy.
"I still don't know why I should not go," Dan said very slowly.
"Because," cried Henry Malmort, pale as death, "no one has ever been known to return after he enters the master's castle. There, Mr. Kirkland, you have it: the silly legend foisted on our community by the stupid mountaineers about us. Every time one of their daughters strayed, or fell into a ravine, or was killed and eaten by wild beasts, it was the men of Montfaucon who did that thing."
"Don't go! Don't go!" repeated Ferron monotonously, as though he parroted the words. And from all that hunched circle of bestial faces and fear-splotched mouths came a chattering, hideous chorus. "Don't go! He is right. Don't go!"
The words beat like hammer blows on Dan's consciousness. Emma's fingers, tight in his own, were ice. Her teeth gripped her lower lip in desperate effort to keep from crying out. Dan shivered as he stared around the circle. Good Heavens! The hag had been right. There were no young girls in this community. Men and women, ancient and gnarled, sacks of corruption and evil effluvia; young men with heavy unpleasant brutish faces—but nowhere a maid of tender years.
Even Henry Malmort was silent in that devil's chorus of warning, as if he, too, were infected with the universal fear...
DAN took a good grip on himself. Confidence returned. He had a job to do, and for some secret reason they did not wish him to meet Laval. Laval's help was necessary. He grinned. Trying to scare him, huh? He'd show them.
The door opened silently. The lamps guttered and waved. A dreadful silence fell upon the room. The babble ceased abruptly. The creatures of Montfaucon shrank against the walls, clawed hands pressed against the rough pine boards, beady eyes fixed in strange horror on that open door.
Dan whirled around. A shadow seemed to fill the opening. A tall, thin shadow that had no form or corporeality. Yet somehow an icy wind swept rustling through the deathly quiet room, while be felt as though something clutched with bony fingers at his entrails. Evil had been in the house before, but now it seemed as if the lord of all evil had entered quietly.
Dan lifted his voice. "Who is there?" How strange his voice sounded!
The shadow moved. It clothed itself in outline as it flowed, rather than walked, into the room—and into the guttering illumination of the lamps. Horror prickled Dan's scalp. Those gliding feet made no sound on the uncarpeted wooden floor.
Emma said, "Oh my God!" very low. The apparition did not seem to hear. He bowed from the waist like an elongated jackknife, jerked back as though on springs. Dan stared at his strange visitor with a sense of oppressing danger.
He was unhuman in his tall lankness. He towered over Dan, who was himself an inch over six feet, like a rank swamp reed above a blade of grass. His incredibly thin body—so thin it seemed to cast no shadow—was clothed in the ancient habiliments of an older day. Tattered velvet breeches, dark as clotted blood, long yellowed hose on dried sticks that should have been legs; a faded waistcoat of strange design from which emerged a dirty, age-yellowed ruff that sagged around a corpse-drawn, greyish neck. His face, thin and elongated like a slab of unhewn board, was a tight grey mask, immovable, blank under a high, hairless dome. But the thing that had brought the low exclamation to Emma's lips and the quivering premonition to Dan was the dreadful mark that etched itself in staring, horrible red on that high, dirt-colored forehead.
A three-pronged design, frightful in its implications. The fleur-de-lis!
Even Dan felt his scalp tighten at the sight of it. The mark that was indelibly branded by the ancient executioners of France upon criminals for whose crimes even hanging or dismemberment, limb by limb, was not sufficient punishment!
The man's blank, lusterless eyes fixed on Emma. His fleshless lips gaped. "The master, Seigneur Guy de Laval, Baron of Montfaucon, commands the presence of the strangers, Monsieur et Madame Kirkland, in his château hall, at the stroke of ten. The carriage waits."
The words of invitation dropped like weighted pellets into an eerie pool of silence and were swallowed forever. A dry, choking whisper rustled among the villagers. Their faces were ghastly in the dimming light of the lamps. Their eyes were pools of imbecile terror. Someone crossed himself hastily in the thick shadows at the rear of the room. The whisper rose to a hopeless wail. "Too late! Too late! The invitation has come!"
With stealthy tread and sliding hands they edged themselves along the wall closer and closer to the open door, cringing away from the strange messenger as though he were the emissary of the Devil himself. One by one, as they reached the door, they flung themselves with desperate haste out into the night.
Dan's strained ears brought to him the pounding beat of their flight up the long valley to the thick-stoned dwellings that were their homes. Jean Perron, stumbling in his haste, Oliver Pornic, with greedy backward glances at Emma's slim body, and Henry Malmore, with warning, furtive shake of head. Dan and Emma were alone in the room, with the messenger who bore a brand on his forehead like Cain.
Emma cried in a small, choked voice. "Let's not go, Dan! Let's go back from Montfaucon. I—I'm afraid of this dreadful place!"
The tall apparition stood immovable, unstirring. He did not seem to hear the young girl's outburst. He appeared to be a dried and desiccated corpse from an ancient grave, waiting... waiting...
Montfaucon! The name of the village. The cold sweat beaded out on his forehead. Good God! That name! He had not thought of it before. Montfaucon was gruesome slang in French for the gibbet, the scaffold, where condemned criminals danced their desperate tattoo with tapping feet on nothingness.
FOR the moment his iron nerve broke. Had he been alone, he would not have cared, but Emma, his adored wife of only a month, the slim young girl he had married and sworn to cherish forever, was with him in this valley of the damned. The strange warnings had been directed against her. She had insisted on coming with him on this first job of his after their marriage. His whole future depended on it. He clenched his hands in anguish. To hell with his future! If anything should happen to lovely Emma in this devil's place, he would...
"Tell your master, Guy Laval," he said slowly and very distinctly, "that we will not come."
There! It was out! It meant the loss of his job, he knew. Dixon had impressed upon him the necessity of getting into the good graces of Laval. But it was for Emma's sake. Of course the stories were mere old wives' tales, but...
The messenger stood there as though he had not heard. The terrible fleur-de-lis flared on his forehead in the yellow illumination like a new wound. He repeated tonelessly, "The carriage waits."
Emma pressed convulsively against Dan with a gesture of relief. Then she gasped. Her slim, virginal body straightened. Her eyes lost their lurking fear; looked wide-arched into Dan's troubled countenance. She knew what the refusal had meant to Dan, what it would cost him. Her cheeks were pale as new-fallen snow, but her voice held no hint of a quiver.
"You must go, Dan!"
He stared down at her brave loveliness in astonishment. God, she was lovely! "But, Emma, kitten," he whispered, "you yourself wanted to get out of here. You..."
She smiled up at him. He must never know what that smile cost her in shrieking nerves. "I was pretty much of a coward, wasn't I, Dan?" she said brightly. "Letting those silly people scare me like that with their talk. But there really is nothing to worry about. Mr. Dixon himself told you Laval was an important man. Of course we must see him, dear. There's the road to be considered, you know. And I'm sure his castle must be quite an interesting place..."
Her smooth, round arm rested on his. It was steady with the steel she had forced into her voice.
Man-like, he looked at her bewildered. "But, darling," he started in protest.
She swerved swiftly to the still, immobile messenger. Her teeth held back tightly the desire to scream at the sight of him. "We shall be delighted to visit your master, Seigneur Guy de Laval," she said in a clear, high voice.
The lank servitor, in the garb of an older day and the unholy brand of a still older time on his forehead, bowed rustily, his hairless head blank of all expression—as though, thought Emma to herself in sudden panic, he had known all along, with uncanny prescience, what their answer would be.
Without a word he turned and glided toward the door. No sound of his passage whispered in the death-silent room. There he paused, his head jerked back over his shoulder in peculiar gesture. Had there been a swift flash of expectant triumph over his tight-drawn mask? Dan wondered dully. It must have been his imagination, a shifting of light values, for when he looked again, only the dread fleur-de-lis broke the expressionless monotony of those corpse-grey features.
DAN allowed Emma almost to pull him along. He should have felt flooding relief at her bravery, at the thought that there was a job still to be done. It would have been shameful if they had fled from inchoate fears, from veiled warnings, back to civilization, back to Dixon. He could never have lived it down. Emma, brave girl, had saved him from that...
Outside, a thin sliver of moon sent its wan radiance over the somber valley. Etched in its ghastly light was a coach, huge and black and oblong like a coffin. Dan started. Why had he thought of such a morbid simile? He had seen pictures of such box-like contrivances, fashioned for the days of Louis the Eleventh. None existed nowadays, except in museums, perhaps. Yet here... Also the horses... Two coal black, powerful brutes, with Stygian, tossing manes, glared with the red, wicked eyes of demons.
Dan whispered quickly to his wife. "Emma, there is still time."
She shook her head. She must be brave. Dan's future depended on her. The wraith with the mark of Cain on his forehead was already at the single door with the lowered step—waiting!
She ran forward, not trusting herself to speak. She sprang lithely into the black maw of the strange vehicle, not heeding Dan's alarmed call.
The interior was musty and dank. A queer, penetrating smell pervaded its vitals—an odor at once foreign, yet familiar in a repulsive way. It was like—like that of an ancient, moldering graveyard after a rain, when the blind worms come slithering up from their horrid feast; and it was like the smell of embalmer's fluid.
Emma turned, gasping, to fling herself out. She could not go through with it. But a grim form sprang in beside her. The white moonlight showed Dan's set face; then the darkness within swallowed him up. He was beside her on the hard wooden seat.
"Dan!" she cried hysterically, "I'm sorry, but I can't—"
The door closed with an irrevocable thud. An instant the corpse-face of the messenger, with its badge of horror, leered in at them through the tiny oblong of the glassless window; then it disappeared. The next moment the coach was tumbling down the iron-hard road, jolting and jouncing behind the powerful heaves of the horses.
Dan said grimly, "All right, kitten. We'll call it off." He lifted his voice. "Hey, there!" he shouted to the invisible driver, perched outside on top of the coach. "Stop the bus. We've changed our minds."
But the coachman did not hear, or hearing, did not heed. The vehicle fairly flew up the valley, the wheels creaking and groaning, the horses' hoofs pounding like hammers on anvils. Dan heaved powerfully at the door. It did not open.
"It—it's been locked," Emma gasped.
Dan's jaw set with a clamp of hard muscles. His hand reached out through the window and pawed along the outside of the door, groping interminably groping—while the musty odor grew stronger and the speed became a whirlwind. Dan withdrew his hand, sank back against the hard back of the coach. His heart pounded, and the veins on his forehead swelled.
"Well?" she cried, with a catch in her voice, "why didn't you—?"
"There is no handle," he answered with false cheerfulness. "Must be a spring that locks as it catches. It doesn't matter, though."
BUT it did matter, and frightfully so. Surreptitiously, he examined the window. It was a tiny oblong, too small for a man's head, much less his body, to pass through. He had tried the door with powerful shoulder. It was stout and solid, built to resist the crashing blows of an axe. There was no other door. They were trapped, helpless prisoners of whatever it was that sat on the coachman's box.
He felt Emma's trembling body cold against his own. "It's my fault, Dan," she whimpered. "I knew it meant your job, and I—I—" She faltered and stopped. As he held her tight in the dark he could sense, rather than hear, the sudden intake of her breath.
"Wh-What's that?" she gasped.
He listened, hearing only for the moment the roaring of the blood as it pounded in his veins, and the slam-slam of hoofs. Then he heard it...
Something was moving stealthily directly in back of him.
Dan swung his body around on the wooden seat, jabbed with balled fists behind him. His knuckles drove against hard wood, crushed into bleeding flesh. There was nothing behind but the unyielding back of the coach—and the breathing grew louder, and the movements increased in volume.
"It must be outside," Emma whispered hopefully. "Someone clinging to the back of the coach."
Dan said tightly. "That's impossible. There isn't any place to hang on. That noise is inside the coach, and directly behind us."
He squirmed frantically around, groping through the murk for the invisible passenger who rode with them. Time and again his questioning hands passed over the soft, shivering body of his wife as he completed the circumscribed circuit of the vehicle. There was no other being or thing in the narrow box. Yet even as he turned round and round, the noise grew louder—and hot breath seemed to fan their cheeks.
"Oh darling, I'm so afraid!" Emma moaned. Her tear-wet face was tight against his cheek. "It feels as if—as if Death himself were a passenger with us."
"Nonsense." Dan assured her with a heartiness he did not feel. They were half way up the valley now. They flashed by the thick stone walls of Jean Ferron's home, then Henry Malmort's—and last, the grey slabs of Oliver Pornic's house.
He shouted again and again as they fled past in a thunder of hoofs. But no one heard, or hearing, made no sign. The fortress-like buildings were a ghostly shimmer in the pale luminance. Their windows were blank and eyeless. Nothing stirred, nothing moved. Homes of the dead, from which all life had fled...
As he peered with narrowed eyes out of the tiny opening, trying desperately to find some way to stop the hellish vehicle, to blast open the door—then he saw their goal. They had almost reached the end of the valley. High up, perched precipitously on an escarpment of rock, were the somber, light-quenching battlements of Guy Laval's Château.
Guy de Laval! Good God! The flesh of his body crawled with the sudden thought. Guy de Montmorency Laval had been, in the old French records, the name of the father of that monster Gilles de Rais! The infamous Gilles de Rais, Bluebeard of France— who had diabolically slain several hundred women and children...!
He groaned and swung with all the strength of his body against the stout door of the carriage. It thrust him back violently with bruised flesh and torn muscles. Emma shrieked. There was pain, quick terror in her sharp outcry.
"Emma!" he called in anguish. "What's the matter?" But there came no answer, no sound but the interminable creaking of ungreased wheels, of hard horses' hoofs.
"Emma! Emma!" Dan hurled himself madly from one side of the rocking coach to another. Everywhere hard, wooden walls met him, shoved him sprawling back. And nowhere was the warm, sweet body of his beloved, the girl he had sworn to protect forever and ever. She had vanished within an enclosed space, through walls that resisted his most powerful heaves...
He shouted and prayed and cursed and raved. And the coach went on and on, never slacking, lumbering up the narrowing road, heedless of his insane poundings, unmindful of his frightful cries to a bride who was gone forever...
His eyes glared, his throat was raw with shoutings. What was that smell? He crouched low in the coach, like a wild animal, snuffing. The graveyard smell was growing stronger. Its moldering stench filled his nostrils like clogging cotton. It became sickeningly sweet. His head spun round and round. He tried to lift himself toward the window, to gulp in the air of night, but his limbs were strangely swollen and heavy.
Something was in the coach with him. He felt its awful presence as a roaring haze descended on his senses. Then he saw it dimly, painfully. A ghastly, formless head rearing itself out of nothingness was beside him, a taloned hand that clutched his weighted, sinking body with a grip of icy steel. The last thing he heard, or thought he heard, before the blackness overwhelmed him, was a low, unhuman chuckle that seemed to come from a million miles away.
THE universe was a vast gyration of revoluting stars. Dan's body floated in an aching void. Then it bumped into something hard and unyielding. With an effort, he opened his pain-swept eyes. The air was chill, and his bruised limbs were drenched with the night dew. Above, the thin sickle of moon was sinking to its grave beneath a pointing finger of stone. Dizzy, and with the odor of corruption still clinging to his befuddled senses, Dan staggered to his feet, looked wearily around.
He had fallen, or been thrown, to the stony ground at the left of the road. A sharp twinge brought a painful groan to his lips. How he ached all over.
Then his eyes went up to the stark grey battlements almost directly overhead. Like a gigantic bat clinging to the side of the hills. Not a light pierced its long expanse. Dark, silent, ominous... Yet behind its blank exterior Dan sensed an evil presence staring stealthily down at him.
His bloodshot eyes glared up and down the road. Not a sign of the coffin-like vehicle in which they had come, not a sign of his wife or of the ghastly driver.
Madness seized him. He clenched his fist and shook it at the frowning walls. His shouted imprecations rolled up and down the valley with thunderous rebounds. But nothing stirred, nothing moved...
Dan's clouded mind gradually cleared. He was weak, and his bruises smarted with fiery arrows, but his brain was clicking again. He gritted his teeth in an agony of anguish. Emma had been snatched from him, dragged by Things of Darkness out of the locked and physical confinement of the carriage. Where was she? What had happened to her?
The first question was easy. Up there, in the castle of Guy de Laval, descendant of the monstrous Gilles de Rais, Bluebeard of France, was the answer. The second he shuttered off in a secret compartment of his brain. He dared not think of that, he dared not answer it. That way lay madness, irretrievable, ghastly.
His swollen, puffed face grew hard and rigid. A moment he raked the valley. No aid could come from there. The villagers, fraught with the same fears were cowering behind thick stone walls. Accomplices of the master, perhaps; in dreadful fear of him, certainly. Fifteen miles of trackless forest separated him from the next village. If Emma still lived—he gulped with the pain of it—he must act at once.
His eyes narrowed. The knuckles of his hands stood out white and bony through battered flesh. He must go alone—a single human being, groggy with pain and hurts, battering against the huge fortress walls of the castle, pitting his puny strength against the dark forces that lurked within.
"Emma!" His bleeding lips whispered the name. "I'm coming!"
His weary limbs dragged him up the road, to the cleft in the mountain range through which the highway was to go. But Dan was not thinking of that now. All his being was fiercely concentrated on the gruesome challenge of the walls above. At the very peak of the pass, the road narrowed and twisted suddenly back up the mountain. The grade was steep and his body sore and weary, but he scrambled panting up the twisting path.
What was happening to Emma?
The dark thought had burst its bonds, flooded his brain with superhuman anguish. God! Let me get there first! Or let her die, rather than...
THE château loomed directly in front of him, blocking his path. His frantic vision raked the lofty walls. They edged away on either side of the road along unscalable cliffs, thirty feet high, smooth, grey, taunting, not a hold anywhere for even a lizard.
A huge, pallisaded gate faced the road. Its massive timbers would have resisted a battering ram. A great iron knocker, glimmering faintly white, as if with ghostly phosphorescence, hung within reach. Dan felt the hair bristle over his body when he saw that the knocker was shaped in the form of a grinning human skull...
God in heaven! What manner of fiendish entities lurked within, to find sport in such ghastly japery? What could his puny strength accomplish against them and their dark forces? But Dan was beyond reason and sanity now. The tortured vision of his wife, her lovely body squirming in the clutch of unnamable creatures, crying aloud his name somewhere within those gates, hazed his senses into a roaring fury. He thudded up to the gate, and grasped the macabre knocker with both hands. The clang of iron on iron went reverberating through the hills. Once, twice, and again.
The echoes ceased. The grey walls leered down at him and the dark night closed upon him with darker mockery. But no answer came from within; no sign that his raucous clamor had been heard.
Dan glared madly up. Was it fantasy that he saw, or thought he saw, red-rimmed eyes, big as saucers, regarding him with faceless stealth from the topmost battlement, mocking his agony.
In a red rage he beat upon the wood with bare fists. "Open!" he mouthed over and over again, not knowing that he was shouting, not feeling the bruising of his hands. Emma was inside, calling, calling...!
He lifted his fist for a final desperate blow. As he did, the gate moved. Imperceptibly, slowly, on a crack, then wider, wider. Behind the great timbers was silence. Yet Dan was sure he heard the labored breathing of those who strive for stealth.
Cunning replaced the madness in his brain. So that was it, eh? The henchmen of the demon master were bunched behind the gate, waiting for his unsuspecting entrance.
He'd show them. He dropped back a pace, tightened his fists. Let but the barricade swing wide enough, and he'd dive in fists flailing. The sudden rush would catch them off balance. In one wild, tearing second he'd be through. Then...
He hunched his shoulders forward for the expected rush. As soon as the gate had opened sufficiently, an army of the damned could not stop him. There! Another few inches and...
A tall, thin shadow glided silently over the road. Its incorporeal form made no noise on the sodden dirt. It wavered an instant behind the crouched figure of Dan, blotting out the stars. The barrier was almost wide now. A fumbling noise came from within. Dan tensed, ready for his desperate, insane dive. The shadow elongated. Something whistled downward through unresisting air. Too late Dan sensed the movement, swung sideways and around. The side of his head exploded. A steel-hard hand, dug into his flesh, dragged him forward. He was falling... falling into nothingness.
A greenish light bathed Dan's pain-wracked eyes as he slowly opened them. The viridescent luminance pervaded all space, stretched inimitably beyond.
Dan lifted his head. It felt leaden, swollen to twice its normal size. Shooting pains darted through his splitting skull, enwrapped his limbs in a fiery embrace. How long had be been unconscious? Where was he?
He looked around, dazed. The chamber slowly took form and proportion. The green light washed against rough-hewn stone on all sides. The timbered ceiling was low and oppressive. At the farther end was a great, shiny, steel figure, more than life-size. It stood upright against the wall, the metallic representation of a super-human woman. Her massive features were terrifyingly rigid in their calm. Her cunningly incised eyes seemed to probe Dan's soul with a malignancy not of earth. The green waves of light tinged her features with cold, impersonal evil. Dan shuddered and dragged his eyes away. There was nothing else in the chamber—just himself and that unhuman metal woman.
Dan tried to move his limbs. Daggers pierced his sides. He groaned and fell back again. His legs and arms were encircled with steel clasps, clamped tight to steel rings imbedded in the rocky wall.
It was a dungeon then—underground, no doubt. He remembered now that tall, thin shadow, the down-descending missile. The coachman of Guy Laval! He must be deep in the bowels of the earth, in a forgotten subterranean chamber of the castle, where his screams and his agonies could never be heard by the outside world. He had fallen into the trap. Cold horror bathed him in an icy sweat, not for himself—Dan Kirkland was not afraid to die—but for Emma, his wife!
She must be somewhere within, perhaps not far from where he was immured. Yet he was helpless, chained...
HE remembered dimly once having read the account of the trial of that fifteenth-century fiend. The tales that had been sworn and attested to by shivering wretches before the lords of the inquisition. Even then the print had danced before his eyes, and he had shut the book in shuddering horror.
There was a grating sound. His eyes clung to the opposite wall, near the statue of the underworld goddess. The wall was swinging inward on rusty hinges. The green glow bathed a long passageway in dim, ghastly light. Something was coning through, with measured tread.
The approaching form stopped, then came on again. It paced with slow steps out through the secret panel, into the dungeon.
Dan uttered a strangled cry. The room wavered and rocked before his eyes. The blow on the head, the aching wounds all over his body, had brought on delirium.
The figure came closer, so close it was barely a hand's breadth away from his twitching body. There it stopped, immobile, facing him.
Emma! His bride of a month! The girl he had thought lost forever!
She stood quietly before him, staring down with curious eyes. He shrieked out her name. "Emma! Thank God! For a while I thought..." He choked on that.
She made no answer. He twisted frantically around, to stare upward into her face. A nameless dread clutched him as he tried desperately to read each lineament. The features were the features of his wife, but the sweetness, the warmth of human understanding, were gone. No light informed the blankness of her eyes.
Dan called her named imploringly, shouted out the little intimacies known only to each other. Perhaps they would pierce that unhuman, frozen look. But the terms of endearment rebounded from the walls, came back to him somehow unclean, somehow obscene. And all the while, the girl he loved, and who had loved him, stood there calm, unmoving, as though she were a thing of senseless stone.
A voice broke in on his anguished pleadings. It was smooth, urbane, cold with mockery.
"It is a pity that she should so soon forget her husband, the man she had joined in wedlock, is it not? But that, my friend is the way of the cursed sex."
Dan twisted in his chains. The wall had opened noiselessly almost at his side, and a figure had stepped through. Dan fell back against the stone with a hoarse cry. It was fantastic, it was horrible. A sable cloak enswathed the looming form. On it, pricked in scarlet bright as new-shed blood, were strange and hideous shapes and figures. Shapes out of some dark and dreadful cabala, figures instinct with gruesome necromancy. And on his head, hiding his face with terrifying mystery, was a peaked hood of blood-red hue.
"Guy Laval!" Dan felt the name tear out of his throat.
"I am the master!" spoke the hooded figure. Welcome to my domain." He chuckled ominously. "My invitations are never refused. See, my servant, he with the brand of France upon his forehead, never fails." He turned aside, to disclose the cadaverous features of the messenger from hell. The fleur-de-lis flamed on the grey, tight skin with hideous fires. The rail-thin man opened his corpse-pallid lips. A pleased chuckle gurgled out.
"And your charming, lovely lady," the flame-hued hooded one continued. His tone hardened, became harsh with malevolent fury. "A whited sepulcher, my friend. A fair exterior clothing rottenness within. One and all, they are the same. You should be grateful to me, my dear sir, for ridding you forever of this she-demon of deception and loathing."
Emma had not moved. She seemed rooted to the spot. Her face was calm and cold, and her eyes were fixed on far-off things.
Dan's heart squeezed with dread. What spell had been laid on his wife?
The slits in the cowl shot baleful lightnings at him. She is a female—woman—is a woman; that is enough to damn her to all eternity. I had a wife once; even as she. Young and fair and all honey and sweetness. What did she do? She left me; she fled from me secretly at dead of night—with another man. Blast them both—and rot them to hell!" His black-gauntleted hands writhed like striking snakes. "Some day I'll catch them off guard, and then—and then..." His voice choked with snarling hate. Then he stopped, bowed urbanely, and went on in a lightning change of mood. "In the meantime I do my poor best in capturing other maidens, lovely as she was, and easing them out of the way of my fellow men."
DAN'S blood chilled. He knew what Emma was facing now. A pervert, a madman, who had soured on all womanhood and in the fastnesses of his castle was exacting cruel revenge from those unfortunate enough to fall into his clutches. Because there was nothing else, he tried a last despairing plea.
"Let her go. She is different. She has never deceived..."
"The more fool that you are," the shrouded figure grated. "You wear your horns and glory in your cuckoldom. But enough! Time presses! Woman, come here."
Emma seemed to emerge from a trance. Her eyes lifted submissively to the muffled figure. She moved toward him, swaying slightly.
"Don't go, Emma!" Dan shrieked.
But she did not hear, or hearing, did not obey. The fiend chuckled, said something to the man with the mark of Cain. The elongated messenger leered and nodded. He pounced upon the unresisting girl, ripped with clawed, bony fingers. There was a rending sound. The thin silk of her dress tore apart. Another slash of his lustful hand, and she appeared in glorious nudity down to her waist. Her firm, smooth flesh shone warmly in the lascivious green luminance. Her molded form was breathtaking loveliness. Yet she did not seem to know, to understand. She stood as before, submissive, waiting, unashamed, her features set in marble mold.
Dan went berserk. He cursed and threatened, he screamed and prayed; he crashed his aching, tortured body against the hard, unyielding metal.
The messenger went stealthily toward the girl, his elongated face aflame with lust. His grey fingers crept slowly over her nudity. Not a shiver, not a movement from Emma to show that she had felt that repulsive touch. Dan was a snarling, raging animal. The blood mounted in his brain, spread in a curtain of fire over his senses.
"Enough of that!" It was the master's voice, coldly sharp. The thin man shrank like a whipped dog. He fell back into a corner, whimpering, whining with fear-suppressed eagerness. His beady eyes devoured the lovely body from which he had been driven.
The shrouded figure chuckled again. It was not a pleasant chuckle. "Fool! After all my teaching, you would still touch their loathsome beauty. This is the only way to handle them."
He plucked from under his robe a long bull whip. It went hissing through the air with a horrible sound. It slashed across the bare shoulders of the girl. As it snaked away from the quivering, tortured flesh, a long red weal sprang into a ridged mound in its path. Emma staggered, righted herself. A toneless cry forced itself through her lips.
Down came the whip again. It sank almost out of sight in the firm, bare shoulder, curled like a live thing. The branded scarecrow crouched in his corner, licking his lips, whimpering with unslaked desire. Blood spurted, as the cruel thong lifted again. The fiend stepped forward with a hideous chuckle.
Dan lunged at him as far as his chains permitted. His clawing fingers reached out desperately. They touched the hem of the torturer's robe. Savage, horrible exultation filled the young engineer. This was his supreme chance. If he could drag down the monster to within reach of his gripping hands, with what delirious joy would he crush that hideous demon!
The tips of his fingers snapped like steel springs on the coarse stuff of the gown. He pulled with vicious intensity. There was a hoarse cry of alarm. The hooded figure tottered, strove to regain his balance. The wine of madness flamed through Dan. He tugged with every ounce of strength he possessed. He was more than mortal now; he was a giant in his hate-imbued ferocity. The shrouded figure cried out again, this time in a shriek of terror. He was falling!
ALREADY Dan could feel in anticipation the windpipe through that enfolding robe, feel it crunch with dreadful sound between his straining hands.
Something long and thin catapulted across the room. Its thin snarl filled the dungeon with hideous concatenations of sound. The fleur-de-lis was livid on its forehead as a skeleton hand shot out to catch the tottering master. There was a violent backward wrench, and the hooded form was free.
The master righted himself and swerved with a howl of rage. The huge whip made a serpentine path through the air, and descended with stunning force upon Dan's unprotected face. The flesh sliced open as if a knife blade had swept down. Blood gushed from his cheek.
"I was going to free you," the black-garbed man howled furiously. But now—" His head turned to the semi-nude form of Emma, who had not moved once through all that time. Then his gaze went to the metal figure in the corner.
When the master spoke again his voice was soft and almost silky. "Now I have other plans for you, my dear sir. I'm surprised I hadn't thought of this before. It will be exquisite—a fitting retribution for your audacity in daring to attack me. Your wife, my good friend, will be the witless instrument of your torture. Then she, too... But enough. We must proceed. Stephan!"
"Yes, Master!" The cadaverous messenger stepped forward again.
"Take this fool to the sweet embraces of the Iron Maiden!"
Before Dan, groaning with pain, knew what had happened, his manacles had been unlocked from the wall rings, and he was being dragged like a sack of flour over the stony floor.
Then the metal woman loomed before him. Shiny, huge, her face coldly merciless in the weird green light Dan felt himself being hauled to his feet. He swayed unsteadily, legs chained together, hands held stiffly in the steel circlets.
WHAT hideous form of dire torture awaited him, and awaited Emma? What was this evil, more than life-size goddess? He fumbled with blurry thoughts. What had the devil in the cabalistic robe called it? The Iron Maiden?
He knew now what it was... The most dreadful torture of the Spanish Inquisition. The hideous, lingering death that first drove its victims mad, and filled the dungeons with unhuman cries.
The master bowed mockingly. "Husband and wife separate soon enough,' he said silkily. "I wouldn't deprive you of the last few moments of her company. More, she shall minister to you. Her own fair, delicate hands shall turn the mechanism, slowly, slowly. It will be a strange and novel sight, will it not? A wife permitting, nay, actually encouraging, the embraces of another woman with her husband. But then, I told you, women are like that."
And his laughter rose in a gust of fiendish glee. "All right, Stephan!"
There was a whir. The steel body of the Maiden opened slowly, gaped before him with horrible invitation. Inside, she was a hollow shell, and row on row of needle-sharp spikes gleamed wickedly.
He struggled and fought with mad strength, but with his fetters he was no match for Stephan. Slowly, inexorably, his body was thrust into the dreadful concavity. The whirring noise commenced again. The twin sides of the Maiden closed slowly, stopped half way. Dan lunged out in one last desperate attempt, and jerked to a halt with a ghastly shriek of pain. The sharp spikes had penetrated his side. The blood gushed hotly over the ripping iron.
HE shrank back, quivering with anguish, holding himself stiffly erect. It was a fiendish scheme. The front of the Maiden was open along a three-inch slit. Through this he could see out into the chamber. The thirsty spikes hemmed him in closely, impinging on his tender flesh at every point. The slightest move, and needled points would tear his skin. But let the sides of the Maiden compress the tiniest bit, and every razor edge would drink of his blood.
Stephan worked swiftly. His chains dropped from Dan. There was no further need for them. He was held more tightly than in any bonds.
"And now," said the master dulcetly, "the last delicate touch." He thrust out a black-garbed arm, caught Emma by her wrist. The half-nude girl walked submissively with him. Her eyes did not waver from their fixity.
He led her to the wall close to the dreadful Maiden that encased her husband. "See, my dear." He forced her rigid fingers on a lever that swung out from the stone. "Press down on this, slowly, very slowly. Remember, very slowly." He was like a schoolmaster instructing a child.
To Dan's horror he saw her hand pressing downward.
"Emma, darling!" he shrieked in dreadful anguish. The sweet girl who was his wife, who had lain lovingly in his eager arms, was the unknowing, hypnotized instrument of his madness and his death...!
Already the avid points were pricking his skin in a thousand places. He stood as rigid as he could, not daring even to breathe. "Emma, stop it," he pleaded. "It's Dan, your husband, you are torturing so!"
All his pleas, his implorings, could not pierce her hazed mind. Her hand pressed steadily down on the lever, in obedience to the master who had drugged and hypnotized her.
The spikes were digging deeper. A million sears of sharpest agony lanced over his body. The sweat poured from his agonized brow, ran down to mingle its saltiness with the ever-growing, sweetish trickles of blood. Deeper, deeper, remorselessly, by imperceptible gradations.
Outside, the shrouded master and the messenger with the brand of Satan, leaned closer, eager not to miss the slightest twitch of the sufferer. Stephan's grey nostrils expanded as if he were snuffing the sickening odor of blood and torture. The master's eyes were wild gleams of glutted madness behind the slits in his crimson cowl.
Suddenly Emma's hand slipped. The lever jerked downward, heavily. The spikes ripped in with furious avidity. A flame of anguish coursed through Dan's impaled frame. The agony of the damned was upon him. A great scream tore through bluing lips, went crashing with thunderous echo through the dungeon.
Emma's hand dropped like a leaden weight to her side. A shiver ran over her beautiful body at that dreadful animal sound. Her head turned. Her eyes were wide, her lips parted. Something struggled in the depths, something that strove desperately to come to the surface. Then, in a rush, her eyes cleared. She stared down aghast, at her semi-nakedness, swerved swiftly to the still-open Iron Maiden. Within she saw the fainting, tortured form of her husband, saw the bright blood dripping with dull splashes to the floor...
She shrieked. Her hand went up.
"Stop her!" screeched the master.
Stephan leaped forward. Quick as lightning, Emma acted. Her slender fingers gripped the lever, jerked upward. Then the messenger of death was upon her, dragging her away.
DAN, fainting, impaled on a thousand spikes, at first did not know what had happened. The horrible pressure had somehow released, the myriad flames had somehow withdrawn with a sucking noise; the narrow slit before him was somehow gaping wide.
As in a dream he glimpsed the hooded torturer springing for the lever.
"Dan! Dan!" It was his wife's cry.
He sprang forward, out of the dreadful Maiden, like a thunderbolt, straight for the man whose slobbering mouth was close to the averted lips of the girl.
He hit him like a stone out of a catapult. He smashed into him, fists flailing, eyes glaring with mad hate. Stephan staggered back. Emma slipped from his arms, fell to the stone floor in a faint. A knife flashed suddenly in the coachman's skinny hand. The fleur-de-lis flared green in the ghastly light. With a snarl he threw himself forward, struck. Dan sidestepped. The keen blade slashed down his side. Then his fist swung up almost from the ground.
All the suffering, all the torture of this dreadful evening, was compacted in that blow. It caught the monstrous man square on the point of his chin. There was a sickening, crunching sound. The elongated head snapped back with a peculiar jerk. A look of hideous surprise spread over the corpse-grey features. He fell backward, his lolling head twisting under him as he hit the ground. A shudder rippled over his bony thinness. Then he was silent. His neck had been broken.
Dan whirled—but it was too late.
"Stop where you are." The master's voice, silky, cultivated. The black muzzle of a revolver was dead-centered on Dan's heart. It held steady in the black-gloved hand of the descendant of Gilles de Rais.
Dan sagged despairingly.
"I really ought to thank you," the master purred. "Stephan was beginning to grumble a bit. He had threatened to tell what he knew, if I didn't treat him right. You saved me the trouble of getting rid of him. But now, my dear sir, we must proceed with the comedy. I shall refine it this time, however. Your lovely wife shall submit to the cold embraces of the Maiden—and you shall watch."
"There is no devil in all hell as rotten as you are," Dan ground out. He poised on the balls of his feet, ready for a last desperate attempt.
"Don't you move!" the hooded man said sharply. "I'll shoot to kill!"
Dan laughed. It was a fearful, un-human laugh. Then he launched forward, like a cat, with claws outspread. If only he could reach that damnable monster before the bullet tore out his life, if only his hands caught hold of the neck behind those muffling folds.
A black finger tightened on the trigger. Dan was in mid air. A sickening sensation filled him. The bullet would drop him in his tracks before he could reach the man.
The dungeon was filled with the explosion of sound, with the acrid odor of gunsmoke. Dan tightened against the tearing bullet. But what—?
The figure with the cabalistic markings seemed to sway. The automatic dropped from nerveless fingers. Then he crumpled into a heap of swirling robes, just as Dan's flying body crashed over the spot where he had stood.
DAN picked himself up bewilderedly, to see a man standing at the entrance to the passageway. A still-smoking gun was in his hand. He was small and dapper and very courtly.
He pocketed his gun and bowed politely. "I see, Mr. Kirkland, I arrived just in time. And Mrs. Kirkland—" His eyes flicked to the half-nude body of the girl. She was stirring uneasily, moaning. He looked away, discreetly.
The man bowed again. "My name, sir, should not be unknown to you. It is Guy de Laval."
"Laval!" Dan exploded.
The lord of the castle smiled ruefully. "So every one thought, evidently. My name has been used for terrible purposes." He moved lithely over to the devil who had called himself the master. He ripped off the blood-red cowl.
There, staring up at him with twisted, lips and blank, beaded eyes, was—Henry Malmort! His ruddy face was grey with the pallor of death, his glossy mustache was stiff with spume.
Dan wavered and sat down suddenly beside Emma. He was terribly weak from loss of blood.
"But why," he demanded incredulously, "did Henry Malmort do these things?"
A shadow passed over Guy de Laval's face. "It's a long story. He is a very distant relative of mine, through a collateral line. My distinguished ancestor made a grave mistake when he permitted Malmort's forebear to accompany him to the New World."
"Your ancestor—" Dan commenced, and stopped. After all, Laval had just saved them from horrible torture.
The dapper little man smiled. "There were two branches in the family," he explained. "It was his branch of the Lavals," he indicated the dead Malmort, "that sired the infamous Gilles de Rais. But to continue. Malmort had married a lovely, innocent young girl of our village. She found out things about him that sent her in the dead of night to my manor for protection. I took her in. Monsieur, I am a married man. My wife has mothered her as her own child."
He paused, went on gravely. "The guilt is mine. I should have taken steps. But he was in a manner a relative, so I did nothing. I live a secluded life in my castle. The villagers, as you have seen, have become degraded wretches, scum of the earth. So I heard very little. Not until this afternoon." His glance hardened on Stephan. "He told me something, in mumbling words. I hardly believed him. Once, a long time ago, he had committed a crime. I judged him, branded him as my ancestors did their erring retainers, then pardoned him. I thought he was repentant. He spoke wildly of maids who disappeared, of horrible rites in Malmort's house. I intended investigating. But first I sent him for you. Dixon had written me of your coming. I had known Dixon long ago."
Dan still did not understand. "But why," he insisted, "did he try first to frighten me away from Montfaucon? He would have received a sum far in excess of the value of his house when the highway came through."
"Ah, yes, the highway," Laval murmured. "Stephen muttered things about that too, and I, God forgive me, thought him a bit crazy. It was only when he disappeared with the coach and did not return with you that I became suspicious. When someone shouted and crashed against my outer gate, and was gone by the time my old gatekeeper had reached the barrier, I determined to investigate. But, as you say, about the highway. This, perhaps, is the answer."
He strode to the right of the grisly Maiden. His keen eyes lanced along the grey stone, came to a tiny hollow. He pressed it. The whole side swung outward, and disclosed a long, shallow niche.
There, in a long row, ghastly in the beating green light, were a dozen skeletons, imbedded in fresh white cement.
Laval's face was hard and terrible. "Stephan spoke of this. Also of other skeletons, whose human bodies had been tortured to death in this house of Satan. This once was a huge vault. When Malmont, in his sadistic vengeance on all womankind for the flight of his wife, slew his unfortunate victims, he immured them in layers of cement. There must be many more tiers behind this gruesome row. That was why he feared the new road, tried to frighten you away; to kill you when he couldn't. The demolition of the house would have disclosed his crimes."
"One thing more," Dan wanted to know. "Your coach?"
Laval smiled. "That coach once belonged to my ancestors in France. Had you been observant, you would have noted that the inside was much more cramped than the length of the vehicle would seem to indicate. There is a secret compartment with a sliding panel built into the rear, where, in case of need, jewels and precious plate could have been stored. Stephan told Malmort of this. He was hidden in there while you rode. It was a simple matter to give you both a whiff of chloroform, and reach through the panel to seize your wife, and then drag her back into the secret compartment."
DAN shivered, and held Emma tight in his arms. The effect of the drug that had made her obey Malmort's will had dissipated.
"The road," he said defiantly, "will go through Montfaucon."
Laval nodded slowly. "It is best. Corruption and the odor of death have descended on the villagers. It is proper that they be driven from this place of horror. I too intend once more to take the rightful place of the Lavals in the great outer world."
Emma murmured with a shudder: "Malmort! Evil death!" Then her lips sought Dan's cracked and bleeding ones in tight oblivion of Laval, of the dead, of the pitiful skeletons that grinned down upon her from the shallow niche.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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