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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Terror Tales, November 1934 with "Monsters of the Pit"
In all the desolate Northland waste there was no other haven for Philip Rollins and his young bride. Yet death in the muskeg would have been better than the terrors which lay in wait for them, in that bottomless hell that spawned its ancient tortures...
PHILIP ROLLINS and his bride of less than a month stumbled wearily through the limitless muskeg of northwestern Canada. To the right, twenty miles off, was the Slave River, bearing in its sullen depths the shattered remains of their canoe and most of their supplies. The Great Slave Lake, their objective, was still a hundred miles to the north, sole outpost of civilization in ten thousand square miles of swamp muskeg and barren tundra. No Indian or wandering trapper ever traversed these desolate wastes.
Rollins turned with anxious tenderness toward his young wife. She was good to look at, Kay was, even with weariness and the tearing weight of her knapsack bowing down her slim shoulders. She caught his glance and smiled bravely. Good kid, he thought remorsefully, not to complain. The whole crazy idea had been his—this spending their honeymoon in the great northern wilderness, drifting in a canoe right up to the Arctic Circle.
At that it had been a glorious adventure, until disaster met them among hidden rocks in swift rapids. They had reached the low swampy shore in safety, but Great Slave Lake was far away, and the banks of the river were impenetrable swamp. So with a grin on their lips and fear in their hearts—carefully concealed from each other—they had struck inland, into unexplored country of which the Indians at the last trading post had spoken with ashen faces and muttered warnings. Not even the timber wolves, they said, were to be seen in its brooding vastness—yet there were shapes and things... and then they took refuge in studied evasions and vague trailing words to all of Rollins' half-mocking questionings.
"Tired, darling?" he asked.
Kay smiled wanly. "A bit," she admitted, and would have fallen if he had not caught her. "I'm sorry," she gasped, "but I—I can't go any further."
Phil looked desperately around. The sun was slanting to the west, a grimly bloody orb. Night was skimming the tangled brush with swift-pacing shadows. Black flies and clouds of mosquitoes rose from the swamps with voracious hums. Night in the muskeg, without shelter, without protection, could prove a terrible thing.
His eyes lit on a low rolling mound to the north, a slight elevation that nevertheless stood out as a landmark in this dreary mixture of bog and underbrush. It was wooded, too, thick with tall waving trees through which the expiring sun forced bloody darts.
"Thank God!" Phil said fervently, "we won't have to sleep in muck. Can you make it, Kay?"
"Of course," she answered. Supported by his broad shoulder she limped and stumbled the intervening half mile. They stood on the edge of the slope a moment.
"Queer," Kay murmured. "I've never seen trees like that before."
Neither had her husband. They were not pine or hemlock or spruce or maple or oak or any other normal and familiar tree of the northlands. Rather they were—and Phil groped blindly for similes—something lush and tropical, like gigantic ferns, with green smooth bark and high waving fronds that swayed in regular dance even though there was no breath of stirring air.
Something tugged at Phil's consciousness, some vague, half-remembered trailing mention by the Indians of a hill in the muskeg. He had not paid much attention to what they had said, and now he was sorry, for he remembered distinctly the ripple of fear that had undulated like a wave over those ordinarily impassive countenances.
But he was too tired now to flog his memory, or wonder at the fantastic growths. Nevertheless an uneasy feeling pervaded him, made him strangely reluctant to enter those dark, tangled depths.
"Perhaps, darling," he suggested, "we had better camp right here on the edge."
His wife slapped unavailingly at darting, biting insects. White vapors rose in miasmic layers from the quivering, rotting muskeg. Already their faces were puffing.
"We'll be eaten alive," she said. "Let's climb to the top. It should be dry and comfortable up there."
Phil shook off his strange forebodings. Kay was right. It was the only sensible thing to do. Those weird fern trees? After all, his knowledge of botany was limited. And Indians were notoriously given to savage and barbaric superstitions. He shrugged them off with a laugh that sounded hollow in his own ears.
"Let's go," he said firmly.
TEN minutes of slow climbing toil and they stood on a level patch. A sharply defined clearing, exactly circular, and hemmed in by tall, monstrous growths. The fast failing light gave no evidence of what was directly beyond.
Kay sank to the ground with a little moan. She had used up the last ounce of her waning strength. Phil forgot his vague, increasing fears in ministering to his adored bride. He flogged his wearied limbs to action, made her a clumsy bed of intermingled grass and smooth, fallen fronds. She smiled at him gratefully and was instantly asleep.
Rollins tried to force his clinging eyelids open, but they seemed weighted with lead. He began to dream that he was in a dank, impenetrable jungle, running for his life, pursued by strange monsters. Already he felt the foul furnace breath of one searing his face, a steel-clad claw reached out and ripped the flesh from his arm. He screamed—horribly.
He awoke, bathed in nightmare sweat, trembling. It was dark, and a thin moon made more intense, rather than lightened, the thick shadows of the waving tree-ferns. The cry was repeated. He stumbled to his feet, gasping. It was not he who had screamed twice.
"Wh-what is it, Kay?" Sleep still clogged his swollen lids.
The girl was a dim, shrinking shape in the filtering light. Her slim figure was taut with fear, her eyes were pools of terror, her cheeks were chalky white.
She pointed. "Over there," she whispered, "I saw something move."
Phil turned a drowsy head. There was nothing but solid shadows and whispering sibilances from the frond-like branches.
"You were dreaming," he said. "Go back to sleep."
He put his arm around her. She was trembling violently—so unlike Kay.
"I—I saw it, Phil," she insisted in a small voice. "I wasn't dreaming. I awakened suddenly. Someone was watching me, I was sure of it. You know that feeling one gets." Her husband tightened arms around her and nodded. He remembered his own dream—or was it a dream?
She shuddered. "There were eyes out there—behind that tree—red, glaring eyes like saucers. I screamed and twisted my head away. And beyond—to the right, were more eyes. Then suddenly, they were gone."
She buried her head on his shoulder. "Let's get out of this horrible place," she wailed. "I'm afraid. I'd rather sleep out in the muskeg."
He fondled her golden, shapely head. "They must have been animals of some kind or other," he comforted. "They won't bother us if we leave them alone." Yet even as he spoke small drifting recollections came to him of what the Indians had mumbled under their breath, back there at the trading post, whispering as if fearful that they would be heard, even at that distance.
"But the eyes were high above ground," Kay said shakily. "About six feet. And these trees are smooth and branchless almost to the very top."
Phil felt a chilling sensation thicken his blood, but he only answered: "You are tired and overwrought. Try to sleep."
At last her trembling ceased, her head drooped back, her eyes closed, her breathing became regular.
Phil watched her with anxious tenderness. The half-heard stories rose to plague him. Stories of the foolhardy hunters who crossed to the hill, and had never been seen again—of the birds of the air who swerved out of their courses to fly with swift-beating wings along the river.
He had listened to many tales told in the disjointed fashion of the Indian. They had seemed idle enough back in the trading post, in front of the heartening glow of the log fire. But now—they took on shape, form, solidity, made this strange wood and its stranger trees a thing of blood-draining nightmare.
He grinned wryly in the darkness. He was ashamed of himself, ashamed of his fears. He was deathly tired, yet he intended keeping watch the night through. If only he had a gun, a weapon of any sort. But then, he thought, he had never shot a lethal weapon in his life. His had been a singularly peaceful existence thus far, except for the breathless adventure of marrying Kay, and this crazy honeymoon of his. He looked at her wan loveliness in the pallid light. He caught his breath sharply. If anything happened to her...
WHAT was that?
A thin rustling sound in the looming trees, their long outlandish shapes silhouetted against a coppery sky? Nothing else! He shuddered and swore at himself, striving to stir up courage. He had been positive someone was watching him, someone whose eyes had bored into the back of his head.
It was damned silly. He knew there wasn't another human being within a hundred miles in any direction. Even if the stories told by the Indians were not old wives' tales, no man, red or white, ever dared set foot in this fabulous territory. Yet no animal's eyes would have given him that sensation in the back of his head.
Kay stirred in her sleep, moaned uneasily. Her lips parted, little strangled sounds issued. She was dreaming, and the dream was not pleasant. Her cheeks were flushed now. She looked feverish. Rollins put a shaking hand to his own brow. It felt very hot. His mouth was dry, his eyes were like molten lead.
He laughed shakily. That then was the explanation. They were both a bit under the weather—a touch of swamp fever, delirium perhaps. Even that was better than...
Oh God! There was that same feeling in the back of his head. Eyes boring into him. It was the fever, he told himself angrily. He must not turn, must not give in to his imaginings. Yet the blood pounded in his veins, drove pulsing through his skull. Something was pulling him, forcing him to turn around. Slowly, irresistibly, his head moved. It did not seem to be a part of him any more.
Two round balls of fire glared at him out of the darkness. They were spaced some inches apart, and glowed, disembodied, almost six feet from the ground. He shook his head to clear the fever. The eyes remained. His tongue was thick and furred. He said desperately to himself: "They're not human—they're not eyes."
A shriek bubbled and racketed through the night. Rollins jumped—his temples throbbed insanely. Kay!
His wife was sitting upright. Fever made two red spots on otherwise paper-white cheeks, her eyes were wide and staring. She clutched at his hand, held tight with a death grip.
"The eyes! There they are again!"
Out of the darkness, out of the gloom of the weird fern-trees, red disembodied orbs floated, closing in on a horribly constricted circle. Orbs that caught the coppery glow of the moon, and reflected it with pitiless, yet strangely human glare. Nearer and nearer they came, soundless, blood-chilling, terrible in their slow advance.
Kay tottered to her feet, biting her lips until they crimsoned with blood to keep back the desperate shrieks that tore at her throat.
"Oh God!" she moaned, "What are they?"
Rollins held her tight. His teeth chattered. He was going mad. Had he seen aright as the moon's rays lanced through a break in the thick fronds to show huge, shaggy, crouching bodies in a dim, glaring circle, only to merge again into unrelieved blackness?
He spun desperately around, seeking escape, anywhere except to remain in that slow, terribly tightening circlet of eyes. Wild hope flared through him, poured strong life into his frozen veins. Directly ahead, into the flat waving fronds, there were no hideous orbs. A sudden swift dash, and...
He hung back a moment, chilled, as a thought struck him. That way, if the Indian tale were true, lay the place from which no one ever returned. He tried to pierce the black gloom. The trees obscured all sight.
The disembodied eyes were closer now, picking up speed, hemming them in on three sides, driving them remorselessly, purposefully, in one direction.
"They're only animals," Rollins lied. "We had better run for it, Kay. This way!"
Through the lush grass they fled, leaving their packs scattered on the ground, into the weird cathedral heights of smooth green trunks and Stygian gloom. On and on, stumbling, smashing into unseen boles, gasping for air in tortured lungs.
And always, at an even distance behind, keeping pace on three sides, slowing when they stumbled and fell, increasing speed when Rollins tried a desperate spurt, floated the disembodied eyes, round and red in the blackness, deadly silent.
Panic swept over Rollins. He heard Kay's teeth chattering with fever and fear. They were being herded, like cows for the slaughter, toward an unknown fate. Yet he dared not turn and face the menace of those baleful orbs.
The strange trees thinned, cleared suddenly.
A great cry burst from Kay. Rollins tried to dig his heels into the soft turf, to brake their swift-rushing flight
It was too late! The ground gave beneath their feet in a long steep slope. Down, down they tumbled, rolling and grasping with fear-stiffened fingers at the strangely smooth and glassy sides, faster and faster until their senses whirled in revolving dizziness. Rollins caught glimpses of the rushing world as he went over and over.
They had fallen into a great conical depression that plunged deep into the bowels of the earth, through which thousands of white columns of steam plumed in slanting spears. Their wet warm breath blasted hot and clammy on Rollins' fevered face. The eerie glow of the pit made ghostly wraiths of the falling couple.
Down, always down! God, would it never stop? Death, terrible in its finality, awaited them at the bottom. No one had ever returned, the Indians said. Their bones would join the moldering heap of other unfortunates at the bottom of the slide, there to rot through all eternity.
Kay's agonized face flashed past him. He reached out a frantic hand, missed, and kept on rolling. Then he stopped, suddenly, crushingly—the universe seemed to have fallen on him. Black waves rushed over his head. Was it delirium or the smash-up of his senses that made him hear a long, weird ululation of triumph from a hundred animal throats before he passed out?
ROLLINS groaned and struggled weakly to a sitting position. His head and body throbbed with exquisite tortures. Where was he? What had happened?
The world around him was a weird glow, interpenetrated with white lances of smoke. Beneath him was a soft, yielding moss-like material. He marshaled his swaying senses, tried to think. Dimly it all came back to him—the baleful eyes, the remorseless herding, the swift descent. The moss had saved him from death. But there was something else, something important that his fuddled senses tried to grasp, and that kept on slipping away. He tried to focus his aching mind, yet only a blur remained.
There was a soft slithering stir beside him. He sat stiffly, heart trip-hammering. A gigantic shape, irradiated into enormous proportions by the drifting steam, almost brushed his shrinking body in its noiseless passage. It stooped in the wavering light. For a single instant red saucer-eyes glared at Rollins. Then with horribly silent tread the monster vanished into white mist.
The veil dropped from Rollins' blurred senses. He sprang gasping to his feet. Cold sweat poured from his face. His clicking teeth formed one frantic word.
"Kay!"
That shadowy monster had flung her on his shoulder, had carried her off! He peered desperately into the eerie haze, a great fear within him. He started to run, aimlessly. He must find her before it was too late. He shouted again, reckless of the consequences.
"Kay!"
Far off, like a dying echo it seemed, came an answering call. Frantic, urgent, gasping: "Help, Phil. Help!" Then, heavy blanketing silence, as if a great hand had clamped down on her struggling mouth.
Rollins rushed like a madman in the direction of the voice. The steam suddenly swirled to one side. Far ahead, dim in the eerie glow, a rounded arm waved convulsively, seemingly out of the ground itself. Then it sank swiftly beneath the surface.
Rollins leaped ahead. His foot caught in a fumarole—he tripped and smashed into the ground. Cursing and sobbing he staggered to his feet again.
Before him was a solid wall of steam—and no sign of Kay or her monstrous captor. A dead blanket of silence enveloped him. He flung himself madly into it, heedless of trip holes, heedless of floating eyes or the strange denizens of the pit. One thought only obsessed him with terrible singleness.
He must find his bride, his darling Kay!
He called again and again into the smothering steam. Dull echoes returned to mock him. He ran again, blindly. The mist coalesced into a looming solid. He smashed into it full tilt. A guttural gasp exploded in the night. The form staggered and was resilient, like rubber—or flesh.
Rollins was beyond fear. He was a yammering, raging cave man, whose mate had ruthlessly been torn from him. He rammed into the obstruction with both fists flailing. There was an answering yelp of pain, as his fist sank into a yielding body. Then something lashed out of the darkness and crashed into the side of his face.
The next instant both combatants were rolling over and over on the turfy ground—gouging, kicking, biting, ravening beasts. Steam, emerging from vents in the soil, scalded them both, blinded them with damp exhalations. A fierce blood-lust sang through Rollins' veins. His fists thudded into an unseen face. The stockbroker was gone—in his place was primitive man battling with unknown monsters. He raised his hand to smash down again. The hand poised in midair, motionless, frozen.
FROM the white-streaked blackness beneath him, from the inert lump of flesh he was pummeling, came a string of curses, obscene, choked, furious, but civilized in all their implications.
He had been—grappling with a human being in this pit of terrors!
"What the hell!" Rollins ejaculated, and jerked to his feet.
The steam clouds wavered uneasily away, to disclose a man, ragged and torn, limp on the ground, staring up at him with fear-swept eyes.
"Who are you?" Phil demanded.
The man struggled to his feet. He held his throat gingerly. A black stubbly beard covered his chin and almost hid his red fleshy lips. His nose was curved like a scimitar and his eyes glinted from under bushy, matted hair.
"Me?" he muttered in a hoarse choked voice. "I'm Judd Wilson. But you—a human being, here, in this horrible place! Tell me," he babbled on imploringly, "you're not—one of them. God, what they did t'me afore I was able to escape!" The man shuddered with what seemed a palsy of fear. "Ever since I fell in, while a-huntin' fer wolves, they had me. They tortured me until—" He stopped short, sank his quivering face into his hands—long, lean and clawed they were—and sobbed great dry sobs.
Rollins felt glacial cold steal over him. Kay was in their hands now. Good God! If... He shook the trembling man harshly.
"They—they have my wife. For God's sake, man, pull yourself together. You must help me. We must get her away. We must all get away. Do you hear?"
Wilson shrank from him. His eyes were crafty, half-mad. They shifted strangely to the background of glowing steam.
"I—I dassn't," he whispered. He thrust his jaw closer. His voice rose to a scream. "This place is Hell—the kind the preachers usta talk about. They're devils, I tell you." Light froth gathered at his bearded lips. He turned as if to make a sudden dash.
Rollins caught him by the collar of his ragged shirt. Pity flooded him for this man, manifestly unbalanced by the terrible experiences he had gone through. But he needed him, needed every possible help to find Kay, somewhere underground in the grip of hideous beings who moved soundlessly, and whose eyes shone in the night like those of nocturnal animals.
He forced himself to speak slowly, as to a child, trying to penetrate the man's cracked understanding. "Judd Wilson," he said earnestly. "We must help each other. Find my wife for me, and I'll help you get away. Otherwise, all of us will die."
Wilson surveyed him craftily. Suddenly he cackled: "Heh—heh! We'll fool those devils yet. I'll show you where they go—down into Hell, but I won't go, I tell you." He was screaming again. "I'll never go down there no more."
"Hush!" Rollins whispered apprehensively. "I'll go myself—just you show me the way."
Without another word the man trotted off into the enveloping smoke. Rollins trod almost on his feet in his anxiety to keep sight of him. All around was steam, great billowing clouds, jetting up from the ground in a thousand strong spurts, overlaying the whole infernal pit with its hissing white glow, hiding the fumaroles, the vent holes, the contour of the ground. Overhead boiled the steam, like soup in a fiery cauldron. Beneath, the earth was hot to the touch and quivered with incessant low rumbles.
In the dim recesses of his consciousness Rollins remembered having read of places like this—fuming pits fed by subterranean fires that antedated the ice age—place of refuge for strange plants and stranger animals while solid mile-high glaciers obliterated all the rest of the northern hemisphere.
But just at that moment Rollins was not interested in erudite scientific explanations. One overpowering purpose burned like a clear flame in him—to find Kay and escape from the weird monsters of the pit.
Judd Wilson stopped suddenly. His stubbly face twitched fearfully. His clawed fingers pointed to a yawning hole directly ahead. In the steamy fog he seemed the wavering shadow of a nightmare vision.
"They live down there," he whispered hoarsely. "Devils! In Hell! I ain't agoing, so help me, I ain't..."
Rollins stared into that ominous smooth round hole. The entrance to Hell! He felt the ridges of his spine bridge and arch under the impact of nameless fears. Memories of childhood rose to plague him, of preachers who thundered of hell-fire and devils. This place, those eerie, half-seen monsters, were like illustrations to those implacable homilies.
He was tempted for an instant to turn and run—to scramble up those glass-smooth sides, to perish alone in boggy muskeg, rather than face the unknown terrors of that yawning pit. But the thought of Kay brought him up with a jerk. He set his teeth hard to still their chattering. His wife, the beautiful girl he had married, with whom he had envisioned a lifetime of happiness, was down there, suffering nameless tortures. The thought of her white body subjected to defilements... He groaned and said: "Wilson, I'm going down. You wait here."
The man quavered eagerly: "So help me, I will. So long's I'm outa their way."
Rollins bent over the cave-like entrance. It was round and smooth and steeply slanting. White puffs of steam Mew out into his face. With an inward shudder he thrust a leg over the edge.
A scream knifed through the billowing smoke behind him. A jittering bloodcurdling scream. Wilson's voice, agonized, hoarse with terror.
"Look out! They..."
Rollins twisted desperately. A dim bulk loomed overhead—something descended with crushing force on his head. Light blazed in his skull, quenched into blank darkness.
KAY struggled vainly in the arms of her captor. Her small fists beat futilely against the great shaggy breast, the shrieks that tore out of her throat seemed curiously muffled, as if by confining walls. The stench of the encircling beast was overpowering.
"Oh God!" she moaned. If it only were the fevered nightmare of delirium—if only she would awake to find a white, starched nurse, cool and competent, leaning over her and saying: "There, there, child, you must rest. You have had a bad dream." She grasped at the thought, played with it. Her head was hot and feverish, her body shivered with malaria. Dear God, it must be so!
But the stench was sharp and acrid, the steamy passage clammy against her skin, and the huge shaggy arms that tightened round her slim form hurt her with coarse bristles.
Down, down, until time itself seemed to lapse, until the very center of the earth seemed near. The tunnel was getting more and more close and fetid, the vaporous exhalations hotter and hotter. Perspiration poured in rivulets from her quaking body.
Then suddenly motion ceased. The mist swept away magically. The air became clear again. A huge vaulted cavern loomed around her, its walls green-glowing.
Her eyes went draggingly to her captor. She felt smothered in his tightening grasp. Huge red eyes, lidless, inflamed with bestial hate and cruelty, glared down at her. The face—dear God—a nightmare out of Hell! Squat, deformed, brown-haired, with broad, flaring, red-rimmed nostrils, low, retreating forehead, and two yellow tusks that protruded from a grinning, slobbering mouth.
The head bent over, the mouth opened, and foul rank odors enveloped Kay in a miasmic haze. She shrieked and went limp.
As the sound of her cry went racketing through the vaulted echoes of the cave, hundreds of man-beasts, similar in bestial foulness to her captor, spewed like devil's spawn out of innumerable clefts in the fused rock walls. The cavern swarmed with misshapen things, converging on their fellow and his captive.
He crouched against the wall, showing his fangs in a soundless snarl. He held the limp body of the girl in one great arm, her white body arced over, head downward, the framing gold of her hair sweeping the rock floor, the fever burning two red spots in her pallid cheeks.
The man-beasts swept on in ominous silence. Foam dripped from their bestial lips, lust burned redly in their rimless, saucer-like eyes. The lone captor gripped Kay tighter. His huge mouth opened and he emitted a roar of defiance:
"Oom—pah—loo!"
The strange savage syllables excited the onrushing mob into a veritable frenzy. The great cavern echoed frightfully to their answering roars:
"Mem—saym—ga!"
Kay had not fainted. Yet she could not move. Terror had paralyzed her limbs, frozen all her vital functions. Her throat was held in lockjaw tightness, her arms and legs were leaden tons. She could not shriek—even that relief was denied her.
She lay in seeming stupor, held captive by one, surrounded by a thousand others—horribly like men, yet not men—the furious lust in their eyes only too evident—about to dispute for possession of her frail body in gigantic primeval combat. If only, she prayed soundlessly through stiffened lips, she could faint, if only they would tear her limb from limb, before...
The circle converged. Great brown bodies sprang forward with howls that sounded like words. Her captor suffocated her in his encircling grip. He shouted defiance. Neanderthal men, misfits in the twentieth century, beast-men who never evolved, cut off in this strange underworld pit thousands of years before by great glaciers!
Kay tried to shut her eyes against the horrible sight. The plunging beasts were almost upon them. Already she gagged at the accumulated fetor of their bodies. A great hairy arm lunged out, caught at her trailing arm. Her captor snarled, knocked off the grip with a battering sweep.
Then they were overwhelmed. Furious dark bodies overlaid her, snatched with greedy paws at her limbs. Racking pains shot through her slender frame—in seconds she would be dismembered. Lungs filled to bursting with stark fear, shriek after shriek released her strange paralysis. She felt herself falling, snatched at, clutched, grabbed anew. Eyes, mouths, fangs, stench, filled the universe. She was passing out.
A shrill whistle pierced the frightful din, pierced her failing consciousness like a sword. A single syllable followed:
"Room!"
Kay gasped dizzily. A second before she had been under a smother of furious pawing bodies, now she was sprawled on the cold stone floor—alone!
The man-beasts, monstrous, gigantic, had gone back in an ebbing wave. They crouched in a great circle around her, panting, snarling, bestial faces turned in one direction, sullenly obedient to that guttural word.
The blood rushed back into the girl's limbs. She sprang to her feet, pressed gasping against the wall.
A strange figure approached from the opposite end of the cavern—a solitary fantastic figure. A thousand eyes watched his steady, unhurried gait, a thousand fear-struck, shuddering eyes.
Kay pressed her hand weakly to her head. She moaned. She could stand no more. Terror, sheer, stark, ravening terror, had unhinged her mind. She was definitely and irrevocably mad. For the Thing coming toward her with even, stealthy pace was not like the others. It was slighter and shorter, and its shaggy skin crinkled in loose folds on the slender frame. From the ape-like shoulders reared a rigid, corpse-white head with conical hairless dome and horribly bulging forehead. As if a freak of evolution had forced vast brains into a skull too small for their expansive pressure.
Her eyes quested frantically around. She must clear her aching head of this frightful fantasy, this thing born of delirium. But the great cavern and its swarming denizens refused to change. The creature strode through a respectful gap, was almost upon her. His eyes gleamed with a frozen light—his hairy hand reached greedily out for her.
Kay swayed, shrieked, and fell. She had fainted.
THE steam was hot and clammy. The heat was fast becoming insupportable. Rollins gasped for air. The vapor seared his throat. He groped through the swirling mist—he was alone in the room—seeking a way out. He must get out before he boiled alive. Horrible fear smote at him. He shouted in thick gulping tones.
Someone, far off, laughed mockingly. It had a fiendish sound. The terrible truth rushed upon him. He remembered now. Those red-staring eyes, that floating soundless step. Of course! Like a fool he had been trapped. He was doomed, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He shrieked, terribly.
That shriek awoke him. He found himself staring into nothingness—into blank white vapor. It was hot and clammy. It ran in acrid rivulets down his streaming face, made his clothes a sodden mess. Something warm and sticky, heavier in body, salty to the taste, ran with it.
He put his hand to his head. It bulged with pain, a long gash reached across his scalp. He extended his arm. It crashed into hard unyielding stone. The vapors of his nausea swirled around him. He was lying at the bottom of a vent hole, and the steam rushed past him from subterranean depths. Low grumblings and mutterings accompanied the hissing fumes.
Rollins got dizzily to his feet, and bumped his head sharply. The passage was low-ceiled. His head cleared. It all came back to him. He had been hit on the head and precipitated into the hole on the heels of Wilson's shouted warning.
Wilson was nowhere in sight—he must have died in the pit. And Kay?
The memory of the shriek which awoke him came back, flooding. It had not been his own voice. It had been Kay's. Then she was somewhere around, here in the bowels of the earth, in frightful peril.
He shouted into the gray mist!
No answer. Was she dead too?
A wave of recklessness swept over him. If she were dead, then he would also die. But first he would kill as many of these underworld monsters as he could. His hands were hot and dry, his throat a furnace. He groped unsteadily through the holing vapors. The passageway led down.
Age of interminable groping, heat that was scalding, air that made him choke with its acrid fumes. Rollins was at the end of his strength. His head hurt horribly. Then he found himself in a small rock-hewn chamber, where the air miraculously had cooled and a dull light pervaded the walls.
He staggered upright, and took deep grateful drafts. The chamber showed signs of habitation. In a corner was a bed of interlaced boughs covered with huge fern fronds. Close to it was a crumpled mass of something furry. Rollins stepped nearer to investigate.
As he did so, his eye came in line with a crypt in the rock. He staggered back with a cry, heart pounding madly.
In the crypt, glowing with a greenish, putrescent light, grinning at him with horrible grimace, was a skeleton—a human skeleton! The fleshless phalanges pointed straight at him with frightful gesture, the green-tinged jaw gaped widely, the eyeless sockets glowed with liquid flame.
A HIDEOUS snarl froze him to immobility. From behind the couch of boughs and ferns a shape rose. A great hairy shape with hate-filled eyes. Rollins shrank back in fear; he could not know that this was Og, the man-beast who had kidnapped Kay. Blood streaked slowly down the hairy arms. One pointed fang was broken at the root.
Rollins looked wildly around for a weapon. There was none, none that could cope with this strange monster from a bygone era. One heave of those powerful shoulders, and he would be a twisted, broken welter of bones like that skeleton in the niche.
The man-beast snarled again. Super-hate distorted the bloody countenance. But not for the frightened man before him. His burning eyes were directed to the crumpled mass on the floor. He pounced, swept up the folds in a great paw.
Then for the first time he seemed to sense Rollins' presence. He shifted triumph-filled orbs in his direction. Clutching tightly at his spoils, dragging it along on the stony floor, he moved forward, soundless, sinister. Rollins pressed against the wall. He could go back no further. The monster was between him and the passageway. Escape was impossible.
Og came nearer, slobbering in anticipation. Rollins tensed his muscles for a last desperate hopeless dive. Already the man-beast's breath was foul on his face.
"Room!"
The single syllable echoed hollowly through the chamber. Og stiffened, jaw muscles twitching in unwilling fear. He looked hastily around. So did Rollins, heart pounding with imminence of death. There was no one in the chamber besides themselves.
Og licked his sole remaining tusk stealthily. Fear and ferocity struggled for mastery on his monstrous features. He swung his head from side to side. Silence! That one syllable had been all.
Rollins watched with a choking sensation in his throat. Somehow, he knew without understanding, his fate was trembling in the balance of the next few seconds.
Og snarled low, looked down at the furry thing under his arm. Fear faded into a grunt of triumph and satisfied hate. He lifted his head, crouched for a spring. Rollins knew then that he was doomed. He waited the onslaught with dull anguish. Memories of his short wedded life, bittersweet now in their futility, passed through his mind in quick succession. He could see the man-beast's legs whip forward as though on steel springs. He thrust out a helpless hand to ward him off.
There was a strange click in the chamber. Og's snarl rattled in his throat, he teetered and almost fell forward. His jaw gaped, and froth gathered in his lips.
The skeleton in the niche was moving! The light in the chamber dimmed and the bony travesty of a man seemed to clothe itself in ghastly green flame. The fleshless hands went up and down, the long-boned legs flexed and unflexed in horrible walking strides. The grinning skull nodded in staccato time, and the jaw gaped with fleshless laughter.
Rollins was transfixed. He thrust a trembling hand across his brow. Even the attacking monster was forgotten in the horror of the living dead.
The jaw gaped wider.
"Room!"
The strange word rolled around the chamber, seemed to emanate from the bony mouth.
A howl of terror answered it. Og threw his bundle down behind the couch as though venomous snakes had basked in its fold. His great legs cleared the bed in one bound, and he was gone, into a cleft that penetrated the rock behind it. At once the skeleton ceased its ghastly approach, appeared to retreat into its crypt and shudder into immobility as the light once more grew brighter in the chamber.
ROLLINS turned to flee the way he had come. He had had his fill. If he weren't mad already, he soon would be. And he had still to find Kay.
In the mouth of the passageway, he bumped headlong into something, someone running the other way.
"Oh Lord!" it gasped, and staggered into the light panting. It was Judd Wilson.
His bearded jaw waggled unsteadily at the sight of Rollins, his shifting black eyes stared as though they had seen a ghost.
"I—thought—you were dead!" he mouthed. "That devil, up there, choked me. Then he went for you. I ran away and hid."
"He hit me hard enough," Rollins said grimly. "But what are you doing down here? I thought all Hell couldn't drag you into this place again."
The man shuddered, looked around fearfully. He seemed possessed with the ague. Rollins could see him grip himself. His eyes lost their half mad light.
"You see," he said quietly, "I came down for that gal—your wife—you spoke about. You were dead—leastwise so I imagined, an' I didn' want to leave a gal with these devils to suffer what I suffered."
Rollins was surprised, and touched. He stuck out his hand.
"Thanks, old timer. Now we've got to find her."
They shook. "Uh-huh!" Wilson agreed. "But she ain't here. That means they must have her in the torture place, the big cave."
Rollins' face was sweaty and bloody. He had lost that round look which lent him dignity in the city. It was grim with desperation now. "What are we losing time for, then?" he cried.
"Right, pardner." Wilson moved hastily for the passageway.
"Just a moment," said Phil. He remembered that strange bundle of fur Og had been so anxious to seize. "What is that fur thing in the corner? Maybe it..."
Wilson's face contorted with agony. "They're coming fer us," he cried. "Hurry, or we're goners."
Rollins followed his fleeing form into the boiling corridor, pounding along with crouched limbs from imagined pursuit. He called on Wilson to wait, to guide him through the steamy darkness. A faint, muffled voice, frantic with fear, seemingly far off, urged him to greater speed.
Rollins, lungs bursting, obediently ran harder. He smashed into unyielding rock, whirled, and felt great wet hairy arms tighten round him in bone-crushing embrace. He felt himself lifted, and carried along swiftly.
He was a captive, a prey to the beast-men of the underworld!
ROLLINS strained at the cruel leather thongs that lashed him securely to a jutting splinter of rock. The great underground cavern to which he had been carried was luminescent with a greenish glow that seemed to emanate from the walls. Its ceiling was lost in a high arch of drifting steam. At the farther end, set in what seemed a natural amphitheater, was a huge black shiny rock, foursquare and flat on top. A grotesquely sculptured figure, of the same black material, towered gigantically in the very center of the altar.
Rollins shuddered, yet could not drag his eyes away from that thing of horror. The workmanship was crude and clumsy, there was no sense of anatomical correctness, and the graving tools had dulled and chipped rather than smoothly carved, yet the hewn colossus literally vibrated with a palpable shimmer of evil, of the compressed suffering and torture of worlds without end.
Its gargantuan limbs were twisted and deformed—one arm dangled shriveled and broken, the other, immoderately long, swept almost to the surface of the rock, and terminated in five widespread cupping fingers, wide and deep enough, Rollins thought with a shiver, to hold a human form in clutching embrace.
The sculptured shoulders sagged as if under an unbearable weight, and the lolling head drooped forward and down as if to permit sight of the great cupping hand far beneath. But it was the strange contorted mask of features that held Rollins' breathless gaze, made him forget his own predicament, even the fate of his wife, in shuddering waves of nausea.
No fiend out of hell, no sinner expiating dire crimes in purgatorial fire, could ever have felt one half the suffering, the keen agony, the torturing pain, that were depicted on that awful graven face. Black stony eyes bulged in frightful similitude of horror, thick red-flecked lips twisted in terrible soundless scream, one cheek hung pendulous as if sliced down to a thread of holding muscle, a deep gash scarred chin and clefted forehead.
A God of Pain! A statue dedicated to Agony and Suffering!
The perspiration started on Rollins' clammy forehead. His eyes darted fearfully around the vaulted cavern. It was deserted, left alone to himself, a captive, and that terrible graven colossus on its sinisterly suggestive altar.
The man-beast who had captured him and bound him securely to the rock was gone. Yet something was brewing, something terrible, and inconceivable. He could feel it in the breathless hush of the cavern, in the twisted figure of the graven image, in the swift rushing plumes of smoke far overhead, in the constant quivering and shuddering of the solid-seeming rock beneath. Was it fact or the mere rasping of tortured nerves that made the tremblers seem more violent than before, the vaporous jets against the arch more dense and billowy?
Rollins flung himself against his bonds again, and fell back, raw and bleeding where the unyielding thongs bit cruelly into his flesh. He was beyond fear for himself, but Kay... Oh God, let her be dead, he prayed fiercely.
HE lifted haggard, sunken eyes. Something slithered along the farther edge of the cavern. He looked again. More flitting, soundless shapes, in tens, in hundreds, in thousands, until to his fevered gaze it seemed that the walls had awakened to fetid, crawling life, that gigantic brown larvae had spawned from lifeless stone to fill the hollow with their bloated forms.
They swept by him in troops, huge man-beasts on silent pads, things out of nightmares, red eyes intent on the altar and its hideous god. They filled the amphitheater, squatted on haunches around the black basalt, thrust hairy heads backward in caricature of an expectant audience at an outdoor play.
Rollins felt his heart hammering in his bosom as if it would burst. For the front line of grisly spectators were horribly crippled figures, hobbling on dangling useless limbs, holding out withered stumps of what once were hands to the leering statue, jaws twisted and gashed, skulls flattened under tremendous pressure. Pathetic beings, smashed in some great cataclysm, peering out of half blind eyes at the personification in immortal stone of all their pain and torture.
Rollins had to bite his lips until the blood ran to prevent a sudden scream. The whole phantasmagoria had fallen into a sinister pattern, infinitely horrible in its implications. Shuddering understanding had come to him. There was no doubt about it now. The rumblings and grumblings of the imprisoned giants of the earth were momentarily increasing. The ground shivered and heaved, and the huge vault swayed as in a storm. The steam ceiling was lower too; its clammy whiteness impenetrable.
A simultaneous ululation burst from a thousand throats, guttural, pregnant with terror and groaning despair.
"Room!"
Their hairy arms, sound and withered alike, went out in fierce supplication to the hideous towering God of Pain.
There was a low underground roar, and a wide irregular crack opened as if by magic in the wall closest to the bound figure of the man. Grayish smoke plumed forth.
"Room!"
Desperation mingled with anguish in the blast from a thousand man-beasts. It held a new, threatening note.
Rollins moaned at the sound. He shouted insanely. "Take me! Take me! Not her! Kay, you are dead—I know it—oh God, tell me she is dead! That they are waiting for me, not for her!" He shuddered into gasping silence. He felt strangely lightheaded.
But the squatting man-beasts paid no attention to his cries. Their eyes were glued fiercely to the altar. A figure was rising slowly out of a trap door in the rock, directly alongside the colossus of Suffering. The ground was a continuous rumble now. Another crack appeared, more blasts of steam jetted into the cavern, but the man-beasts were intent only on the rising figure.
Rollins stared at the apparition with the smaller body of a man-beast and the head of a nightmare. High and bald and gray it was, with a ghastly, putty-like texture, and the forehead bulged in a horrible curve. Black cruel eyes glared frozenly at the mute-stricken assemblage.
"Room!"
Half-sigh, half triumphant echo. The immortal creature whom their fathers and forefathers had followed submissively in his priestly ministrations to the sculptured Pain God, would save them from impending calamity. Prehensile fingers grasped a short, crudely hammered sword whose blade was dark with sinister stains.
In his anguish, Rollins noted that one man-beast alone who did not bow like the rest before the minister of evil. It was Og, the brute he had met in the chamber, who had been compelled to drop his vaguely seen trophy by the lifelike apparition of the skeleton. He crouched to one side, lips retracted from yellowed fangs, great paws clenching and unclenching, red-rimmed eye overflowing with hate and baffled fury.
The priest of pain lifted his sword. There was a stir behind the altar. All heads bent toward the stir like a field of corn before a storm. Rollins craned too, fearing what he would see. The underground convulsion was increasing in violence; the mutterings were becoming low roars, but not a head turned from its strange focused intentness.
Two figures emerged, climbed invisible steps to the rear of the altar. They were carrying a third. The two were hairy brutes, Neanderthalers like the rest; but their limp burden was slim and khaki-clad.
"Kay!"
A great tortured cry burst from Rollins at the sight of his bride, her lovely golden-crowned head drooping over a hairy arm, her cheeks paper-white.
SHE raised her head at the anguished voice of her husband. She opened her mouth weakly and collapsed again.
They were on the altar now. The priest advanced, towering over her stricken charms. He made a gesture. The man-beasts placed her in the cupping fingers of the God of Pain. Her slender legs dangled over.
"Room!"
Exultation, fierce delight, swept the nightmare audience. There was but little time, but the victim was prepared, the priest skillful in his ministrations. Surely their god would drink with gusto the sufferings of the sacrificial girl, and ward off catastrophe from their underground world. Never in all the unimaginable antiquity of their dwelling in the pit had such a toothsome morsel been offered in vicarious sacrifice.
Rollins twisted and strained until the muscles corded on his body—and the veins bulged startlingly—futile, half-insane efforts, for the rawhide thongs cut only the deeper, and the knots would not budge. He shouted strange oaths in a voice he did not recognize for his own, he clamored frantically against the rising roar of the quake, yet the man-beasts paid no attention to his cries. The ceremony on the altar held them in fierce grip; only through it could they be saved from the inevitable.
The priest bent low over Kay. His curiously compressed mouth was close to her. Sounds, indistinguishable at a distance, issued. The girl looked up with horror-struck eyes at the apparition above her, and shook her head in repulsion.
The priest of the beast-men glared at her a moment, lifted his crude iron sword, and slashed suddenly downward. Again and again he slashed, while Rollins, teeth clenched, eyes a red blurry haze, made strangled noises.
Khaki blouse, khaki breeches, woolen stockings, silken underthings, shredded away. The white slim body of his bride, virginally molded, lay utterly nude in the greedy fingers of the god. A great shout burst from a thousand throats. Red eyes glazed with lust and knowledge of what was to come. Og crouched lower and made little panting noises. His fierce stealthy gaze wavered between girl and priest.
Kay shrank from the strange baleful glare of the bulging skull above her. He leaned over again. His cold, putty-like lips made a clammy trail on her white bosom, brushed over a tender breast. Sounds issued that Rollins could not hear.
The girl shuddered convulsively with mingled fear and shame. Again she shook her head in desperate refusal.
The priest-creature reared back. Hoarse bellows of rage snarled in his throat. His sword swept down. Raw flesh ridged magically across a gleaming white shoulder. Bright blood spurted in fountain cascade over rounded limbs and thighs. Kay screamed—a high-pitched pain-shot scream.
Rollins pulled at his thongs with insane strength. The girl he loved was being tortured before his very eyes, a white vicarious offering to the bestial God of Suffering in place of the man-beasts of the pit.
The Neanderthalers were on their hairy legs, howling and roaring with hideous exultation. Soon, very soon, the anguished god would be glutted, even as he had been in the past, and the threatened whelming earthquake would subside.
But the whole cavern now was rocking on unsteady keel. Gray blasting steam poured from a dozen vents. The air was fetid with sulphurous stench. The man-beasts wavered. They seethed in an agony of fear. In the murky haze they seemed like devils gyrating in a fiery cauldron. Their voices rose to a hideous roar. They surged toward the altar. Rollins sensed, even though he did not understand, the clamor of their guttural syllables.
The sacrificial victim was their only salvation. They mouthed at their priest, yelping with fierce fear.
Quick! There is no time to be lost. Torture the stranger girl, make her to writhe with nameless agonies. Rip her! Tear her! Slice her apart! Offer the steam of her cries to the great God of Pain. Glut him with the warm spouting of her blood. Quick, before he visits us the terrors of his wrath! Already he roars his anger at us; we have been remiss in satisfying his lust for pain, for the joys of writhing limbs. He will feed on us instead, his worshippers and adorers. See, the walls quiver; the steam from his nostrils envelops us. Do not dawdle, oh priest of our forefathers, but smite with the magic weapon.
Kay's nude form lay limp in the obscene fingers of the god, white purity in a shambles of sight and sound. The hideous priest lashed down again. A gaping wound seared the other shoulder. Kay moaned feebly. The Neanderthalers leaped and mouthed gibberish. To their brutish imaginations the restless earth was already subsiding. Soon the god would have his fill of blood and pain and relapse into his usual somnolence.
Mercifully, Rollins was only partly conscious. He could bear the awful sight no longer. As in a clogging dream he saw Og, face a mask of hatred, jump for the altar and swing himself aloft just as the frozen-faced priest raised the dripping sword again.
Og went for him with a snarl of demoniac frenzy. The minister of suffering swung around. The gray bulge of his forehead bobbed insanely. The sword swung with him.
SUDDENLY the cavern filled with a swelling roar that drowned out the petty shrieks of the combatants, of the horror-struck Neanderthalers. The underground giant had aroused himself. Rocks ground on rocks. Great sections of stone tore loose from the walls to fall with great crashing sounds among the howling snarling man-beasts. Hot blasts drove pulsing vapor from a thousand crannies, filling the hollow with searing heat. Tongues of liquid flame darted forth, dripped molten lava on the quivering floor. They formed hissing pools that spread with horrible slowness over the tumbling rock. The whole world seemed to rend in ruining fragments—the din was indescribable.
The last thing Rollins saw was the priest of pain and Og locked in straining embrace. The short sword rose and bit in the great hairy shoulder. Og went down, and the priest of the beast-men snatched at Kay's naked form and seemed to disappear from view.
Rollins went stark mad. Heedless of biting pain he ripped at his bonds. Scalding steam hissed across his tortured body. Lurid flames enveloped him. Jagged rocks came hurtling to the ground, mashed into bloody pulps the shaggy, bodies of the Neanderthalers. In the murky, red-shot haze they ran, stumbling and shrieking, in every direction. Their god had failed them, their offering had not been enough. He was glutting his lust for torture with them instead.
Rollins heaved again, staggered. The jutting splinter of rock to which he had been bound disintegrated into a hundred pieces. The leather thongs fell from him. He was free. With a gibbering cry that matched that of the beast-men themselves, he plunged into chaos.
Just how he found the opening in the altar was forever to remain a mystery to him. As was his miraculous avoidance of rocks and lava and steam and the blindly fleeing Neanderthalers. But find it he did—a quaking, shimmying smoke-filled cavity that led down into invisibility.
He plunged in without hesitation, running, thrown from side to side by stunning concussions, gasping in the acrid atmosphere, obsessed with one thought, to find Kay and the bulging-skulled priest before it was too late.
Flame lashed out behind him, hot tongues seared his shoulder as he staggered into a chamber. It was the cave in which he had met Og. Irresistibly his eyes turned in the green-glowing murk to the couch. On it was the white body of his bride, nude, screaming, struggling under the backward pressure of the priest of the beast-men!
With a snarl that was half animal, Rollins cleared the intervening distance. The creature sprang up. A hair-covered hand caught clumsily for the sword, slashed down in a sweeping arc.
ROLLINS did not attempt to duck. He felt the slicing of his shoulder as a thing remote from himself. His hands shot out, caught the hideous being by his neck. His clutching fingers were infused with a terrible strength. They tightened.
The priest gurgled horribly, while his putty-gray face and overtopping skull retained their frozen malignity. The iron sword made a wide gash in Rollins' arm. But he was beyond hurts. The struggles grew more feeble, more spasmodic. The sword dropped with a clatter. Rollins pressed harder.
The figure slumped. As it did, the shaggy, brown-haired skin parted and fell open. It slipped to the floor. The lolling head shuddered and rolled off. It shattered into a thousand clayey pieces.
Rollins opened his fingers and started back.
"Judd Wilson!" he gasped.
The man slid slowly down. His black-stubbled chin wagged feebly, his crafty eyes were dulled with the glaze of approaching death.
But Rollins sprang with little moaning sounds to the side of his wife. She smiled wanly up at him. The blood dripped slowly from her wounded body.
"I'm—all right," she whispered.
He caught up the shaggy skin, enveloped her tenderly in its clinging folds. Then he went back to the dying trapper, feet unsteady in the swaying of the ground.
"Well, Judd Wilson," he said harshly. "I knew the priest to the god was not one of the beast-men, but I didn't expect to find you tricked out in a mummer's skin and a plaster head."
The prone man twisted feebly and looked up. "I'm a goner," he said with difficulty. "I—I fell in here years ago. They tortured me with the sword—they're mortal afeard of that god of their'n. They usta draw victims by lot if no outsider happened to blunder in. They think that's the only way to keep him quiet."
Wilson groaned as the ground heaved again. "Fer centuries," he continued with slow laborings, "they had a priest fer the pain-god. Seems as though, long time ago, there was a wise man of their tribe. His brains grew so they bulged out his head. And he lost all his hair. He got the notion of the Pain God, and made hisself high-priest—claimed he'd never die. Of course he was a fake, but when he died, his son kept it quiet, and fashioned a skull of plaster so he'd look like his father. It's been handed down secret in the family.
"Afore I passed out, the priest dragged me in here—wanted me to last fer the next ceremony. I killed 'im with a rock. Then I skinned him, covered myself with his pelt like a robe, shoved the plaster skull on my head, an' fooled the whole gang—except Og. But he warn't sure, and the skeleton of the dead priest I rigged up with strings scared the daylights outa him."
He paused a moment, and Rollins was certain he was dead. But the mouth twitched, and words dribbled out painfully. "When—when you came, I was scared you'd be smart enough to expose me and take my place. Then—I wanted the gal—ain't seen a woman in years. You was in my way; so I tried to kill you, while pretendin' to help. But she—she wouldn't listen, even on that damned altar, and all those fiends screechin' fer her blood."
His head lolled, his eyes closed, his face was the color of death.
Rollins shook him fiercely. "Wake up." Wilson barely opened his eyes. "You've been a dirty rat," said Rollins. "Redeem yourself now. How do we get out of this Hell?"
Judd Wilson grinned pallidly. It was like a corpse laughing. "Easy," he muttered. "Ain't no use t'me no more. Found it a while ago, while exploring. Behind the bed's a hole. It widens later an' leads to the muskeg on the other side of the hill. The priest job made me feel important, so I didn't want to quit."
Far off a rumble started, like the swift approach of an express train over bumpy rails. It grew in volume until their ears were blasted with great concussions of sound. Then, a grinding crashing roar followed, and the whole world seemed to collapse. Powdered rock dust swept into the chamber, and thin squirts of steam.
Wilson heaved himself up, supporting himself with sudden strength on both elbows. A ghastly grin split his face.
"That was the end. The cavern's blown up, with all the beast-men—They an' their damn Pain God!"
The strength went out of him. He sank to the floor, shuddered and lay still. Judd Wilson was dead.
THE green glow was gone, but red flame, licking through the stone, made murky illumination. The earth, silent after its tremendous effort, started slow trembles again. There would be another and mightier quake soon.
Rollins caught up his wife. She had fainted. He fumbled behind the bed. A narrow hole showed blackly. He squeezed into it, went bumping and bruising through an interminable passage. Half way through there was another terrific crash. The tunnel collapsed behind him in a shower of flying rock and debris. The passageway to the pre-glacial world was forever barred.
An hour later he stumbled out into a vista of flat muskeg and buzzing mosquitoes. It was night.
Behind them there was a glow in the sky. The hill with its strange tree ferns was gone, leveled by the earthquake, heaped into the mysterious pit that had pierced its bowels. Kay stirred, lifted her lips. Rollins pressed them hungrily.
And ten days later, the trading post at the nethermost end of Great Slave Lake was startled to see two scarecrows come staggering in from what had been considered impenetrable, lifeless muskeg. Willing kindly hands caught them as they fell, nursed them through days of delirium and fever, through strange babblings of beast-men and Pain Gods, and tree-ferns and worlds in the depths of the earth. When the fever finally left Rollins and his wife, Kay, they were gaunt and wasted, but on the road to recovery.
Johnson, the chief trader of the small community, shook his head: "Ye be mighty lucky, strangers. Ain't no one ever come through that muskeg alive. Where d'ye hail from?"
Rollins told him, in halting, gasping words—his strength had not returned as yet—knowing in advance he was doomed to disbelief.
Johnson did not disappoint him. He shook his head with a frown. "I know—I know," he said hastily. "Ye've both been babbling some while ye were sick, but then ye were pretty low wi' the fever when ye came in. That's what comes of listening to them damn Indian stories."
"But," Rollins argued weakly, "I tell you it all really happened. You can still see the remains of the earthquake."
Johnson grinned sheepishly. "I wouldn't go there fer nawthin'," he said. "It's—it's..." He fumbled for words, "it's too mosquitoey!"
Rollins should have known then and there that he was licked. The beast-man's skin was not good evidence. In the course of their delirious march, the dark brown hair had rubbed down to bare skin. Johnson maintained it was nothing more or less than the mangy hide of a timber wolf.
But Rollins tried again. "Know Judd Wilson?"
Johnson looked startled. "Sure," he said slowly. "He was lost in the muskeg several years ago. Died in the bog or starved most like."
"Judd Wilson," Rollins remarked evenly, "was the priest to the Pain-God."
For the moment he thought he had the skeptical trader. Then the strange, half-frightened look on the leathery face gave way to a broad smile.
"That there Wilson was such a damn liar when he lived, yuh can't even believe him when he's dead," he grinned.
Rollins turned blindly to his wife for comfort. There was nothing more for him to say.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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