RGL e-Book Cover
Based on an image created with Microsoft Bing software
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.
RGL e-Book Cover
Based on an image created with Microsoft Bing software
Terror Tales, June 1935 with "Railroad To Hell"
Kent Chandler and Jane, his lovely young wife, scoffed at the lurid tales of restless spirits haunting the deep ravine called Devil's Gap. They did not believe that the victims of that awful accident which had sent Jane's father to a disgraceful death could come back from the grave to exact a hideous vengeance. But when ever-lasting Fayre, the madman pastor, rose from his year-old sepulcher to marshal his vengeful minions, Kent knew a brave man's fear, and Jane explored the most profound abysses of despair!
JANE CHANDLER hurried up the wooden steps of Abner Tracy's General Store. She had a good deal of shopping to do, and she wanted to get back to Kent before it grew too dark and the threatening storm was raging.
Yet, for a tiny second, her hand trembled hesitantly on the doorknob. Pale, yellow light struggled dimly through the grime-encrusted windows, and voices made a confused murmur within.
It was almost a year since she had last been in this mountain village of dreadful, haunting memories. Her eyes lifted involuntarily to the backdrop of the hills. There, silhouetted blackly against the light-fading sky, thrusting gaunt, skeletal fingers out into the abyss of Devil's Gap, were the broken remnants of the railroad trestle.
On the other side, ascending the steep slope of Thunder Mountain were the unseen rails her father, Henry Stanford, had built. Up near the very top, hidden by misty distance and the thickening shadows, were the huge drums around which the steel cable wound to haul the cars up the terrific grade to the plateau. It was the steel cable which had snapped, precipitating screaming women and children into the devil-haunted depths of the chasm.
Jane straightened her slender shoulders defiantly. It had not been her fault; it had not been her father's. She was not afraid to face the mumbling villagers, even though they knew that Kent, the young engineer she had married a month before, had come to Devil's Gap to rebuild the trestle so that Henry Stanford's railroad could run again along Thunder Mountain and into the upland country.
Her small hand firmed on the knob, twisted. Loud talk eddied around the half-dozen men in the store as she entered.
A booted mountaineer peered slowly at Jane and jerked erect with an explosive gasp: "Old Henry Stanford's gal!"
A sudden hush fell on the men. Their heads craned in her direction, froze. An alien influence ringed her in as she walked to the counter. She pushed a penciled list across the pine boards.
"Mr. Tracy, will you please get these things for me right away?" she ordered steadily. "I'm in a hurry."
The storekeeper's round, normally ruddy countenance was slightly pale now. His jaw dropped at the sight of his customer. But he forced his lips into the semblance of a welcoming smile.
"Why certainly, Mrs. Chandler," he greeted her. "Of course! Glad to see you again. Hear you're married now. Don't know as I rightly remember Mr. Chandler."
"No." Jane fought to keep the quiver out of her voice. Why had Abner Tracy winked that violent warning to the men behind her back? Why had they stiffened into strange silence at her approach? What caused the secret terror that lurked in the far corners of Tracy's eyes? "Mr. Chandler's never been to Devil's Gap before."
Tracy fumbled for the supplies. His fingers trembled with queer nervousness. He jittered the parcels down in front of her as if he were striving frantically to get her out of the store before—
A stealthy mutter beat upon her ears. It came from behind. "There's a curse on her! I seen Everlasting Fayre myself last night!"
The blood misted in a frozen vapor around Jane's heart. Then she whirled on the man who had whispered, tiny fists clenched. "Joel Harris," she demanded, "what nonsense are you spreading? Everlasting Fayre's been dead a year. He—he died with the others."
The man glowered at her sullenly. "It's the truth," he insisted. "I seen him plain as day, standin' in the middle of the road. He raised his hands to the sky, like he always done when he were a-preachin', an' he called down the curse of the spirits of the Gap on your dad and all his kin forever!"
"You hush up, Joel!" Tracy shrilled angrily. He turned imploringly to Jane. "They're just a bunch of superstitious hillbillies, Mrs. Chandler. Don't you be taking any stock in their wild talk."
"It ain't no wild talk," a tall man spoke up. Jane knew him too. He was Zeke Lowe, the teamster who trucked supplies from the village along the treacherous old trail road into the back country. "I seen Everlasting too. So did other folk." A growl of assent swung around the silent circle. "His hair and his beard was stiff with blood, and his face were a funny grey. He preached agin your pa and anyone what tried to build that bridge again. Cursed you all with the curse of the Gap, he did!"
"For God's sake, Zeke, keep still!" Tracy expostulated.
But Lowe rumbled on:
"There he was, a-shoutin' 'bout how the devils of the Gap broke the cable 'cause they resented the bridge over their haunts, and how next time they'd take a mightier vengeance. Then my hosses started running hell-bent-for-election, and old Everlasting sorta vanished back into the cemetery."
JANE breathed hard, as if she had been running. She fought to keep her sanity. It was impossible, what they said. Fayre was dead—she had seen his crushed body, had seen him laid in his grave—and the dead stayed dead.
"I—I don't believe it," she forced through tight lips. "You must have had a drink too many when you saw that, Zeke."
"I never touch a drop," he answered shortly, finally.
The silence grew oppressive. A man got up from his box, went shuffling into the dusk. Another arose without a word and followed him, sliding past the girl as if the curse of the fanatic, half-mad preacher were in truth already upon her. Then another, and another, eyes averted, breathing heavily.
Joel Harris said with a grunt. "Old Everlasting never did like the railroad. He prophesied 'twould make the spirits mad. He warned the women not to take the cars to the Social t'other side of the Hills. But they had their minds set on't, an' wouldn't listen no how. So Fayre, he went along, figurin' as how a preacher could fight the devils. There he made a big mistake." Harris shook his big, powerful body as if he were a dog, and thumped slowly out of the store.
The light from the reflector-lamps seemed to haze before Jane. The store was suddenly cold. The shadows in the back swirled with the misty faces of those long dead. "It's all buncombe," Tracy said kindly. "Just you go home and forget it, Mrs. Chandler."
But Zeke Lowe, face gaunt and stubbled with beard, shook his head. His little red eyes lingered secretly on the girl. Then he too sidled out the door.
Jane stammered something incoherent, snatched up her bundles, fled into the gathering darkness. She must get back to Kent, her husband. She had left him poring over blueprints in the little cottage they had rented only that afternoon. He was alone, absorbed in the plans for the rebuilding of her father's railroad. He knew nothing of Fayre's ghost, of the demons who lurked in the Gap, of the curse upon her family. If he did, it would have made him laugh. Of course, they were ridiculous, the things she had heard, but...
She hugged the packages tighter to her bosom, hurried on. The single, dusty street was deserted. Shadows crept noiselessly down Thunder Mountain, hemming her in. Lightning played over its bald, precipitous peak, and thunder growled warily in the distance. Jane's French heels tapped loud and eerily on the flagstones.
Why was there no one else in the street? It was not yet very late. When she had entered Tracy's Store, there had been men sitting on their front porches, shambling down the road. But now...
She tried to laugh at her growing fears, but the laugh was choked off in her throat. Accursed? She and all her kin? She half-smiled. Mere superstitious rot! Yet the silence was unbearably ominous. Not even a dog lifted its voice. The houses along the street seemed blank, untenanted—where warm, cozy lamps had gleamed before!
The road took a sudden turn. There, glimmering ghostly white in the invading night, lay the cemetery. The tiny plot of ground had swelled beyond its bounds in one dreadful day. The pitiful headstones—crowded close together in death—like the bodies whose graves they marked had been that fateful day—seemed to sway in the darkness.
"Accursed! Accursed!" they seemed to moan with soundless fury. "Henry Stanford's girl. Accursed!"
God! That taller tombstone, towering over its companions, seemed to rear itself into the air, as if the bearded, big-thewed Everlasting Fayre were clawing out of his coffin at the very sight of her.
Jane stumbled on. It was madness, of course; nightmare imaginings induced by the silly gossip in the store. How Kent would rumple her hair and hold her in his arms and laugh! If only she were already in the cottage!
The muttering thunder rumbled weirdly among the crags. It sounded to her exactly like the mocking laughter of evil spirits lurking in the boulder-strewn Gap. Good Lord! There she was being silly again. She forced her head up in defiance, and stopped suddenly short. For one dreadful instant, the blood congealed in her veins. A package dropped with a dull thud from her nerveless fingers. What were those strange flickers of flame crawling up the mountainside, along the outer rim of Devil's Gap? It was pitch dark now and the forked lightnings had died away. Yet those thin, quivering fires moved with horrible celerity, higher and higher. They appeared to be splotches of yellow light seeking an unknown goal: bodiless flames, alive with some hideous life of their own.
A strangled moan forced its way through Jane's gelid lips. She started to run wildly, madly down the black road. The things she had purchased in the general store scattered along the backward trail unheeded. One overwhelming thought hammered in her skull, poured fiery liquid through her veins: she must get back to Kent before it was too late. Only in his arms would she be safe...
THE strange lights converged and vanished suddenly. The night was an ominous, all-embracing blackness again. Silence brooded over mountains and the Gap. Jane slowed to a stumbling walk, groping her way fearfully along the curving road. Her laboring lungs gulped in the warm night air. It had been an illusion—she tried to tell herself—a queer exhalation of phosphorescent vapor such as often lures the unwary traveler into the foul recesses of a swamp. But inside her shapely head, beyond all doubt and argument, she knew what they were...
They were the spirits of the Gap, gathered in a conclave by the avenging ghost of Everlasting Fayre. Once before, they had glutted their hate on those who had dared thunder on rails over their unholy haunts; now they gathered to wreck their wrath on the defiant humans who invaded their fastnesses again.
Jane hastened her pace. Her heart squeezed at the thought of Kent alone in the little cottage, bent over his plans and figures, unwitting of the risen figure of Everlasting Fayre, of the evil Things of the Gap. Why had she ever left him alone? Jerry Shannon, his young, freckled-faced assistant, had gone to the county seat to check a shipment of supplies. He wouldn't be back until late. Tomorrow the laborers would pour in, ready for work. But tonight, now...!
She was running again, blindly, a sudden, horrible fear for her husband clamping her throat. Lightning sent a jagged streak across the mountain. Was that thunder which rustled like cracking paper on the heels of the flash? Thunder? Great God! Thunder did not move on stealthy feet through the shadows of the encompassing trees; thunder did not slither into ominous silence a fractional second after she stopped suddenly, ears straining for further sounds! Thunder did not resume its creeping stride the moment she flung herself forward again!
Frantic with fear, Jane raced over the pebbly, rutted road. Around the next bend, almost half a mile away, was the cottage. Kent's strong, warm arms would keep her safe from the nightmare horrors of the night. But half a mile! God, would she ever make it?
The Thing behind had abandoned secrecy. It was racing after her, pounding the hard dirt with heavy, thudding pace. She dared not look behind, she dared not falter a moment in her pistoning stride. Her lungs were panting bellows of fire, her heart a clanking weight that tore at her ribs. The breath whistled in her throat, mingled with the fierce exhalations coming from behind.
The Thing was gaining on her. The pounding grew nearer. Hot foulness seemed almost at the nape of her neck; hideous, clawing fingers stretched eagerly for her running, trembling body. The bend in the road! She flogged her failing limbs to renewed spurts. There, not a hundred yards away, was the cottage and...
Merciful Heavens! The house was dark, a mere indistinct blob against the cupping hills. Kent was in bed, asleep, exhausted from his day's work, unknowing of the dreadful Thing that pursued his wife.
She tried to scream, to shriek for help. But the muscles of her throat were constricted with nightmare paralysis; the tortured breath failed in her bursting lungs. The pounding feet behind were hammer-strokes in her ears, almost upon her!
Jane forced her dying strength into a last desperate spurt. A clutching paw fastened the thin stuff of her dress, ripped the cloth. A savage snarl rasped through the darkness. Then she was flinging her icy body against the door that led into the house. For one dreadful instant, it resisted the struggle of her thrusting slenderness. The crunching of feet on cinders was loud in her ears. A gloating chuckle pierced her hammering skull; ice-cold fingers gripped her shoulder.
"Kent! Kent!" she screamed insanely. The desperate wail racketed through the blanketing night, reverberated through the narrow foulness of the Gap, flared up the mountainside in ghastly, mocking echoes.
The fingers on her shoulder tightened, lanced like glacial splinters into her flesh. Jane jerked forward uncontrollably. Terror gave her super-human strength. Pain gashed her shoulder as she smashed into the door again. The she flung herself headlong. The creaking barrier had yielded.
Even in the shattering concussions of her fear, she knew what she must do. She scrambled up from hands and knees, crashed the wide-thrust door shut on the charging, black-solid figure outside, slammed the wooden bolt home just as the pine barrier groaned under the heavy impact of her pursuer.
She shrank back from the quivering door, back almost to the low-glowing embers in the fireplace. There was no other light. The red shadows made wan splotches on the faded wallpaper of the nearer wall, died into grey-black nothingness again.
"Kent!" she screamed. "Help!"
THE Thing outside hesitated. She could hear its lumbering feet scuffing against the wooden sill of the door. Another such blow and the flimsy pine would not hold.
She crouched low, moaning faintly. There had been no answer to her anguished cry; there was no other sound in the thick silence except the stertorous gasping of her own breath, the dreadful scraping noise beyond the door.
Thud—thud—crunch! Thank God! Tears of relief rolled down her cheeks. The Thing was going away, going down the cinder path back to the road. He had heard her call Kent, and had thought...
Panic fear filled her again. What had happened to her husband? He was not in the cabin. He had said he would work late, had sent her off to the village with a tender hug and an admonition to be back before it was dark. Even if he had been tired, and fallen asleep, he should have heard her screams. He was always a very light sleeper. The hearth fire, too, was low; dull ashes overlaid the faint red of the still-live embers. The lamp was out and the peculiar smell of kerosene told Jane that the wick had burnt untended. Dim in the clustering gloom, she could see the table and the spread plans. Kent never left his papers out when he was finished; he had a passion for neatness and orderliness. Swift realization burst like an exploding shell within her brain. Kent had been taken from the cottage! The Things in the Gap had struck against her husband!
A great cry crashed through the darkness. Jane did not even know she had screamed. She raced madly across the room, flung aside the heavy curtains that veiled the window, and glared out. Kent, her adored Kent, taken by four demons! She remembered those climbing flares on the mountainside. Nausea churned her stomach. In a searing flash she envisioned the awful truth. The vengeful Things of the Gap were taking him to their secret lair. They...
Lightning gashed the heavens. A blinding, corpse-white flame darted across the black background of the night. Out there, on the road, facing the house, silhouetted for one terrible moment in the flood of streaking light, was a looming figure.
It faced the house with right arm uplifted, as if it were invoking the terrors of the sky, the infinite rage of Hell, on the doomed house and all its occupants. The glow from the storm illuminated tawny, blood-dabbled beard and hair, hideously contorted features, grey with the greyness of death. Mad, measureless hatred showed in the bottomless pits that should have been eyes.
One dreadful instant, and the lightning wiped it out of existence. A crash of thunder split the heavens, drumming a receding tattoo among the crags. The blackness closed over firmament and earth with clamping tightness.
But Jane had seen—and recognized—the apparition. It was Everlasting Fayre, the fanatic madman who had preached of everlasting Hell, of damnation and of the demons of the Gap to the superstitious natives of the hills. Everlasting Fayre—who had dropped to his death with all the women and children when the cable had broken—whose body had lain moldering in the little cemetery for almost a year. Risen from his grave, an avenging corpse, he had come to doom with dreadful curses the kin of Henry Stanford.
Out of the darkness of the night came a low, sinister chuckle. Then that, too, was gone. The room, the night, the earth itself whirled dizzily around the girl. She tried to hold her slipping senses, to grope blindly for physical support. Her fingers clawed along the wall, flexed even as her body crumpled. A single shooting star blazed across the vault of Jane's consciousness. Then the waters of oblivion flowed over her head...
HER eyes opened wearily, closed again. Good Lord, she must have fallen asleep while waiting for Kent. What was taking him so long? It wasn't like him to go out and leave her alone in a desolate, old house, buried in the middle of the wilderness. Strange too, how her head ached, and how very hard the bed seemed!
She opened her eyes again, dazedly. Only a little glimmer of red showed pallidly on the hearth—the last dying embers of a forgotten fire. There was a strange odor in the house, too. Her nose crinkled in disgust. It was the acrid smell of burnt-out wick, of raw kerosene... She heaved herself erect, looked wildly around. She remembered now.
"Kent!" she cried hopelessly. The darkness muttered with eerie whispers, but her husband did not answer. Fear seized her abruptly by the throat, choked off further sounds. Kent, the man she loved, was dead or worse! Outside, hidden by the enveloping blackness, were the dreadful Things of the Gap, marshaled by Everlasting Fayre, the corpse who was their leader. They were waiting, waiting tirelessly for her. Soon they would come, crawling and slithering along the walls of the house, seeking entrance. Soon their grave-cold fingers would caress her body, and they would take her—even as they had taken Kent—to the unholy fastnesses of the chasm that was their hideous home.
Her straining ears seemed to hear first faint rustlings, the thud of approaching feet. No, no! That was merely the pounding of the blood through her heart; the mad whispering of her own thoughts.
Then a quick frenzy seized her. She shrieked defiance to the evil beings who waited hungrily for her; she stamped and yelled until the slender whiteness of her throat was a raw ache. The madness left her finally, a cold, whimpering little girl, even as she had been years before when the lights were out, and she conjured shapes in the shadows on the wall of her bedroom.
Shadows! Walls! Ghosts! She raised her heavy head, tried to pierce the dun murk. Not a sound; silence as of the grave, just like that of the untenanted coffin of Everlasting Fayre! She laughed insanely, and the laughter frightened her. If she stayed here, she would surely, certainly, go stark mad. And Kent! Perhaps he was still alive, perhaps the climbing demons had not harmed him yet...?
She jerked forward, stumbled to the door. She would go to the village and get help. There would be men there who could forget the past and the loss of their families long enough to help her find her own dear one, and save him from Fayre and his attendant devils. Men like Abner Tracy, the storekeeper; like Zeke Lowe, the teamster. They were men of business, accustomed to the outer world. They were not afraid of demons and corpses, as the other natives were. Yet Zeke himself had seen lights, had beheld the gory figure of old Fayre. That meant... She stopped with fingers frozen on the bolt. She too had seen!
Then the madness enveloped her again. Fear for her husband, for the mate to whom she had sworn love and fealty through life, made her mind plunge along a single, narrow groove. Those men would help; they must help! Jerry Shannon, too, would be back. It was late; the train had no doubt come in while she lay there in a faint.
The bolt creaked rustily back; the door swung open. She ran stumbling and panting down the path, the crunch of the cinders loud in her ears. There was no moon, but the sky had a dull glare that portended a storm. Thunder grumbled ominously in the distance.
The night was thick with shadows and strange noises. The road seemed to open before her, as if to lure her on and on, and to close behind her with stealthy rustlings and gloating, obscene laughter. But a driving, half-insane purpose forced her on the dolorous way. God! How long that mile seemed! Somewhere in the distance, the demons lurked; somewhere Kent was being dragged to a horrible fate. She must get help; men—strong and human—to fight bravely against the loathsome creatures of the night. What could her slender, feminine strength avail against corpses and clawing devils? In her terrible frenzy, she did not stop to think, to understand...
Thank God! The road twisted, led into open fields. Just ahead lay the village, sprawling like a shapeless beast in the dim, reflected glow of the storm-bellied sky. No lights showed from the vaguely outlined houses. There was no light even in the General Store. At the farther end stood the railroad station, the terminus from the county seat, dark with sullen gloom.
No sound, no motion... The village seemed an empty husk from which all life had been sucked by strange forces. Good God! It was impossible. Her quivering body slowed to a creeping, sagging walk. What had happened; where was everybody? Not even a dog barked. Death emanated from the untenanted town, death and the effluvia of approaching madness. Had Devil's Gap also been invaded by other-world visitants; had the inhabitants been dragged shrieking from their beds, even as Kent...?
THE thought of her husband pumped the hot blood through her veins. Far off, so far away it seemed from another planet—came a thin, long-drawn-out sound. Whoo-oo-ooh! Joy flooded her then, sent her stumbling on. That was the whistle of the locomotive, pistoning its solid, substantial wheels along the single track. The train was coming, bringing crew and passengers—and Jerry Shannon! Jane's mind clung to that comforting thought. Jerry, with his broad Irish face and merry grin, would know just what to do. Not all the devils in Hell could stop him from finding his Chief.
The whistle died into a thin wail, like the trailing gibber of a wraith, and was gone. The blood that had raced so warmly just a moment before clabbered now to thick jelly. Bands of steel compressed her skull in a crushing vise. The train was departing from Devil's Gap! It had already been in, discharging its load and passengers.
Jane swayed crazily. That meant Jerry Shannon had come, had already been engulfed in the eerie menace that overshadowed the village. That meant...
A new sound crashed through the muttering night. Something was banging and clattering down the road—out of the empty, plague-stricken village;—coming directly for her with a dreadful, desperate tattoo, smashing and rocking through the murk in a wind of its own creation.
Jane tried to fling herself out of the way of this onrushing juggernaut, this unknown thing that already was almost upon her. But her body was anchored with unyielding lead, and her feet were numb, rooted weights.
Then the darkness split. Two horses, lathered with foam, eyeballs glaring with equine madness in the flicker of lightning that ran over the heavens, manes flowing stiff behind them in the wind of their flight, galloped straight for the fear-rigid girl. A great wagon bounced and jounced in the hard ruts behind them, and a man stood up in his seat, lashing them with whistling whip.
His face seemed distorted into a mask of terror. A black beard studded the grey, drained parchment of his face. His mouth was slack and loose; his little red eyes were fixed balls of mania.
Again hope flared through the girl. She flung up a slender arm, cried quickly: "Zeke Lowe! It's Mrs. Chandler. Stop! I need help!"
But the teamster seemed neither to hear nor to see. His eyes were fixed on far-off horrors. Again he lashed wildly along the horse's steaming flanks with his heavy bull-whip. The great animals surged forward, trembling under the biting blow, their iron hooves drumming on the hard-packed earth.
Jane leaped just in time. The team hurtled, in a fury of noise and motion, over the spot where she had stood. Already they were a banging, diminishing blur in the distance, yet Zeke Lowe's whip still belabored them. Then the bend in the road snatched them from sight, and all sounds were cut off as if the earth had swallowed them abruptly.
Jane's knees were water-weak. They seemed to ebb away from her, unable to support her body. What dreadful thing had sent the fear-crazed man on such an insane flight; what horrors lurked in the streets of the ominously dark and silent village?
Jane clenched her teeth, forced her unwilling limbs to move. In spite of devils—in spite of corpses who should be moldering quietly in their graves—she must go on. Only in the village was there possibility of help. Someone must still live—someone able to help her seek her husband.
The flagstones made hollow noises under her weary feet. The houses were ominous with unseen menace. No lights showed; no sound rang out to challenge the click of her heels. Yet somehow, the skin along the ridge of her spine prickled from the glare of hidden eyes. She was being watched, she felt sure—every move she made, every little dragging gesture! Those hidden eyes bored tunnels of ice into her beating skull, into the frozen marrow of her bones. As if—as if dead women, dead children, were reaching out for her with grave-cold thoughts, cursing this last living Stanford who had dared return to Devil's Gap...
SHE tasted salt blood on her lips. She had not known she had bitten them through. Ah, there was Abner Tracy's Store, the only one in Devil's Gap! It was a flourishing business, the sole source of supplies going to the back country—supplies that reached the hill-folk with difficulty by means of circuitous mountain roads and Zeke Lowe's trucking service.
The store also was oppressively dark and silent. Queer, too, for Tracy prided himself on his lamps and the shiny reflectors that spread an even glow around the piled-up shelves. He usually kept open until quite late—for at least an hour after the arrival of the last night train. What had happened to Abner Tracy? Despair coursed sluggishly through Jane's veins. Tracy had been her last hope, the last straw at which she could clutch. He was sane and sensible, not superstitious like the others. He had mocked all the shuddering dreads that made the natives avoid the Gap from which the village had taken its name. And now...?
The door yielded slowly to her trembling hand. The darkness within was like a clammy shroud. It assailed her nostrils with prickling odors of hay and flour and cider and dried beans. Dread squeezed her heart. A short, quick scream rasped her throat. Something had stirred, something that loomed as a darker shadow where the counter should have been.
Jane whirled madly and tried to flee. But it was too late. There were quick scuffling steps, a grip of steel on her shoulder. "No, you don't!" A man's voice, strange, harsh, croaked.
The grip tightened, held her immobile. Then there was a sharp, scratching noise, the quick flare of a match. The light dazzled her terror-wide eyes, illuminated briefly her shrinking form.
The man gasped. "Mrs. Chandler! What? Hold on a minute!" His grip relaxed. The sounds his feet made were loud in the dark. There were fumbling murmurs, and the splutter of another match. The yellow glow cupped momentarily; then the store sprang into familiar illumination. The man had lit a reflector-lamp.
Jane swayed on unsteady legs, but the pounding in her heart grew more bearable. She recognized her captor. She had met him the year before, when her father was building the railroad. His shrewd, dark features and faultless clothing had been a familiar sight in the little village. Her father had never liked him, and had told him so in blunt, plain language. He was William Kirkland, representative of the C.R.&R. Railroad that fed into Devil's Gap.
But Jane was not thinking now of former dislikes, of rivalry for business. Kirkland was a human being, flesh and blood—not a lurking demon of the Gap, not a corpse from a long-sealed grave.
"Thank God, it's you, Mr. Kirkland. I—I'm so frightened."
He stared at her with narrowed eyes. The first shock of their meeting was over. "What's the matter?" he asked gently.
"I—I don't know. But my husband—you know Kent Chandler?—he's gone. They—they've taken him, and—" tears were streaming from her eyes. "You must help me get him back!"
"Take it easy," Kirkland advised. "Who took him, and where?"
"The spirits of Devil's Gap, and Everlasting Fayre. They took him up the mountain, and they're going to kill him."
Surprise showed in his eyes, and a dawning suspicion.
"I know you'll think I'm mad," she went on, "but it's true! You must believe me. I saw Fayre myself—a year-old corpse—and he chased me all the way to my house. Zeke Lowe saw him too; so did—"
Kirkland was upon her with a swift, catlike motion. He gripped her arm so tightly that it hurt. "Where is Zeke now?" he demanded.
She shrank from the fierceness of his gaze. She was suddenly afraid of this man. The stories she had heard of his unscrupulous methods raced through her hammering brain.
"He—he just left the village!" she gasped. "Tearing down the road with his team as if the devils were chasing him too. You—you're hurting me."
"Sorry," Kirkland muttered, releasing his powerful grip on her arm.
She felt a little braver then. "You had an appointment with him?"
"Why—uh, yes. That is, nothing special." He laughed, but there was no true merriment in his laughter. "I came in on the last train, and found the village dead. Even Abner Tracy's gone. Then you come with a story—"
"It's true," she assured him earnestly.
KIRKLAND looked at her a long time, and little lights crawled in his coal-black eyes. Involuntarily Jane moved back, suddenly afraid. He laughed as she did so. "I can see something has frightened the whole village half to death, and you too, Mrs. Chandler. Now I'll tell you what you better do. You stay here in Tracy's store where you'll be safe, and I'll go and see what it's all about."
Jane said very low: "All right." Then a thought struck her like a blow. Kirkland said he came on the last train. In that case...!
"Where is Mr. Shannon?" she asked. "Didn't he come with you from the county seat—from Meredith?"
There was a frown on Kirkland's dark face as he moved hastily toward the door. "Shannon?" he echoed hurriedly. "No, I guess I didn't see him." Then the sinister blackness swallowed him up greedily. Not even the sound of retreating footsteps came above the low whisper of the breeze.
Jane darted to the door, bolted it. She was terribly afraid. She knew Kirkland had lied. He had seen Kent's young assistant come off the train. The blood roared in whirlpool rapids in her heart. What had happened to Jerry since then—Jerry, to whom she had clung as the last desperate hope for saving Kent?
The store became suddenly a place of dreadful menace. The familiar sacks of potatoes, of meal, the bales of hay, took on strange, threatening shapes. The lantern swung slowly, rocked by an invisible wind. It cast eerie, moving shadows on the fly-speckled walls. The far-off rear of the store was a pool of ghostly, uninvaded darkness.
Jane shivered, clenched her hands until the sharp nails drew blood from the palms. She was alone—alone in a village of death and desolation, a village from which every human being seemed to have vanished! What dreadful horror had driven Abner Tracy to desert his store? What pursuing Thing with scorpion whips had lashed Zeke Lowe into mad flight? Where was Shannon? What...?
She moaned, and the sound made her shrink affrighted. Kent, her husband, was being tortured even now, a helpless captive in the hands of a risen corpse and his crew of unholy demons, while she, who loved him more than life itself, remained cowering in the village store. Kirkland had gone to his rescue, but what could he do—a dapper city man, a pusher of pens and a schemer of schemes—with pine wood? A scream formed in the recesses of the chasm.
Great God, what was that? She shrank against the counter on unsteady legs; her hands gripped desperately for the smooth pine wood. A scream formed in the hollow of her throat, died in strangling constrictions.
Something was in the back of the store, where the lantern glow tried in vain to penetrate against piled bales and boxes and barrels. Something was crawling and slithering with terrible slowness out toward the light!
Jane's limbs were gripped in nightmare paralysis. Her skin was a tight casing that made breathing almost impossible. Her bones were grating dust and powder. The corpse that had once been Fayre was coming for her again, coming to claim her for his own!
Merciful God in Heaven! There, in the sharp dividing-line between yellow light and the impenetrable dark, a hand emerged. It was a long, grey hand, inching its way over the white-dusted floor—a hand of corpse-grey veins and sinewy fingers, spattered with blood.
Jane stared, unable to move; unable to breathe. The hand crawled forward, clutching, gripping with bloody fingers at the smooth boards, arching along in dreadful parody of life.
Farther and farther into the light it slithered—a bodiless, gory hand. The store rocked and swayed before Jane. She tried to run, screaming, from that ghastly, crawling tiling. But stark horror held her fast.
An arm followed, evil, black-shrouded, slithering along the flour-dusted boards. Then—oh God, why was she tormented so?—a head, face down, groveling with infinite effort; forward, ever forward.
Jane's brain seemed to explode. The frozen torrent of her blood seethed in an overwhelming flood. Roaring fragments filled her skull. Her mouth gaped wide, and her throat twanged like a great harp. She screamed, and the noise went racketing through the store with dreadful concussions of sound. Her limbs jerked forward, toward the door, toward the waiting menaces of the night. Anywhere, except with this Thing that crept, face down, like a blind worm, into the shadow-laden light.
Jane gasped, froze in mid-flight. At the sound of her shriek, at the pounding noise of her racing heels, the Thing that crawled like a worm lifted its gory head. Eyes filled with agony stared up at her. The head lifted, revealed for a moment a freckled face and fell down again, twitching. "Water!" came in a smothered moan.
It was Jerry Shannon, Kent's assistant!
JANE forgot her fears, forgot everything but the sight of that young lad, hurt and broken, inching along toward the safety of human-kind. Little sounds of pity welled from her as she ran to him. She lifted him with pity-strengthened arms into a chair.
His tousled red hair was stiff with dirt and caked blood. His head lolled to one side. But his blue eyes opened and a faint, wan grin played over his mouth. Jane was crying: "Jerry, what did they do to you?" even as she flew toward the bucket of water that always stood by the edge of the counter. She brought a brimming dipper from which he gulped the life-giving fluid in great, greedy draughts. Then she tore off a piece of cloth from a bolt of cotton, dipped it in the water, washed the blood and dirt from his face, hands and head, daubed the ragged gash she found along his scalp with peroxide from the shelves.
Shannon straightened, struggling to regain his strength. "Thanks!" he said with a rueful grin, elbowing up awkwardly. He felt gingerly of the wound in his head.
"But what happened?" Jane cried feverishly.
"I—I don't quite know," he answered. "I remember getting off the train, wondering why everything was so still and quiet. No lights anywhere; the whole place was pitch-dark. I started down the platform for the village, when I heard voices at the other end. Two men were speaking. I don't know just why I edged quietly away, toward the back street that makes a short cut into town. Maybe it was the eerie feeling of it all, the overwhelming darkness."
Jane leaned forward eagerly. "Who were they, Jerry? Did you recognize them?"
"Sure. Kirkland, the C.R.&R. man, and Zeke Lowe, the teamster. I thought it was a bit funny; those two whispering in the dark like that."
Swift suspicion flared through Jane. "Didn't Kirkland come on the train with you?"
The lad looked at her in surprise. "Why, no, Mrs. Chandler! I was the only one to come this far." He looked at her, went on again. "Anyhow, I groped my way through the alley, aiming for the store here. I thought I'd get a flash, maybe find out what was wrong in town. Just outside the back entrance, though, something struck me on the head. I don't remember anything after that until you screamed."
Jane choked back a little cry. Her wide eyes darted fearfully toward the rear, where the shadows lay in an oily pool. Then the Thing had lurked outside, waiting cunningly. It had struck poor Jerry down, and he had crawled, stunned and bleeding, across the rear threshold, into the store. That meant the door had been open; that even now, perhaps, the grisly attacker was creeping on silent feet toward them!
Shannon jumped up from his chair. He was much stronger now. "What's the matter, Mrs. Chandler?"
"Back there," she shrieked through stiffened lips. "Something's coming in!"
Feet thumped hollowly on the creaking boards. Shannon whirled, eyes blazing, freckled face quivering with excitement. His hands fisted into hard knots.
"I'll get that—!"
A man plunged headlong from behind the barricade of boxes. He was panting heavily, as if he had been running. Sweat oozed from every pore on his ashen, fear-stamped skin. His smooth, ruddy face twitched spasmodically. His body twisted backwards, in attitude of deadly terror. He collided with a huge sack of meal, sent it thudding to the floor. He whirled with a gasp of fright, saw the pair in the yellow flare of the lantern, fell back with a scream. There seemed no recognition in his staring eyes.
"Mr. Tracy!" Jane cried out, "it's us—friends. What's wrong?"
The storekeeper jerked his head up, passed a large hand over his face as if to wipe out the memory of a dreadful sight. He came forward slowly. "I—I saw—" he quavered.
Shannon stood, legs spraddled, fists still clenched. "Sssh!" Tracy whispered warningly, with a quick movement of his head toward the girl.
But Jane had heard. Her face was very pale; her heart pounded, but her voice was steady. "It's no use keeping it from me," she said. "Tell me what you saw."
ABNER TRACY groaned. There was remembered terror in his eyes. "I heard strange noises some time ago," he panted. "Like the sound of an army marching, like—dead feet moving along the road. I ran out to see what it was, and—and there was no one! No one in the village, do you hear?" His voice had risen to an insane pitch. "Everything was dark and deserted. Yet the noise of the marchers continued, seemed to flow past me in an icy wind."
He looked at Jane imploringly. "I'm not a superstitious man, Mrs. Chandler. You know that. But I thought then of the demons old Fayre always said haunted the Gap. I was scared, and ran down toward the station. Zeke Lowe said he was going there to meet a man. I—I needed human companionship. But the place was as dark and silent as the rest of the village." Tracy gulped and went on. "By this time, the tramping noise had stopped, and I got my wind back a bit. I was ashamed, too, at having run like an ignorant hillbilly. I started to come back." Tracy's gaze twitched side-wise, as if he were afraid of something out there in the night. He croaked hoarsely: "And God is my witness, I saw him then!"
"Who?" Shannon whipped out.
But Jane shrank back, crying inwardly: "No, no! Don't tell!" She knew!
"Everlasting Fayre!" The words thudded in her brain like smashing hammers. "I never was scared of the old fool when he was alive, but now—!" Again Tracy peered fearfully behind him. "When a man's dead, and been buried almost a year, to see him glaring at you in the night, with his beard and hair dabbled with blood—to see him marching down the road, and a great noise of marching Things behind him, when you can't see a living soul—why—why—" He broke down, buried his face in his hands and whimpered softly.
The store was thick with slithering menace. The lamp swayed in the wind, but no light penetrated the thick shadows that leered at them crazily from behind the heaped bales. Outside, the night was a pounding noise of invisible, marching feet. Or was that the racing of the blood in her ears? Jane's spine crawled with innumerable tics. Abner Tracy, ordinarily calm and sensible, had seen—and was turned into a broken, trembling man.
"Poppycock!" Shannon declared loudly, as if he were trying to bolster up a confidence he did not feel. "This is all silly talk—this stuff about ghosts, and spirits and corpses that march."
Tracy raised his head. "I thought so myself, young man, when the others talked. But I saw!" He jumped up feverishly, gripped Jane by the arm.
"Listen, Mrs. Chandler," he implored. "You'd better get out of Devil's Gap before it's too late. You and your husband and young Shannon. Zeke Lowe was right; so were the others. There're unholy creatures in the Gap who resent the coming of the railroad. They smashed it once, and sent poor women and children to a terrible death. They laid a curse on your father and all his family—and now you've come back to build it again. Old Fayre has risen from his grave to warn you—to warn us all. They'll get you this time; they'll get everyone in the village."
Shannon took a quick step forward. "What?" he demanded. "Stop building the bridge? Turn and run like whipped curs because a bunch of superstitious fools think they see things! You don't know Kent Chandler, Tracy, if you talk like that."
The storekeeper disregarded him. He clung desperately to Jane's arm. "Please do what I say," he quavered. "I laughed just like this youngster did, but now I know. It'll mean loss of business to me if the bridge isn't rebuilt, and the railroad doesn't run again. I have customers up there in the hills. Zeke Lowe's team's a mighty poor way of shipping 'em my goods. I could sell ten times as much with the railroad delivering. But I'd rather lose every penny I have then see you and Mr. Chandler an' the rest dragged into the Gap by a dead man and his army of the damned."
For one rending moment, Jane wanted to run out into the night, up the road past the station, along the state highway that led away from Devil's Gap as fast as fear-impelled limbs could carry her. Then she remembered and the thought curdled the blood in her veins. Kent, her husband! He had fallen into the hands of the demons! Perhaps even now...!
She shook Tracy's hand off her arm. "It's too late," she said unsteadily. "They have Kent already."
Jerry Shannon was at her side, fierce, grim. She had never seen the youngster so aroused before. "They've got the Chief?" His voice was harsh, brittle.
Tracy stared in surprise. He seemed puzzled. "Why, there must be some mistake," he said. "I forgot to tell you, in the excitement. But I saw Mr. Chandler just before I saw Fayre. He was walking very rapidly down the road, toward your house. I called to him, but he didn't seem to hear."
FOR a timeless instant, the universe seemed to have stopped dead for Jane. Then the blood surged in wild leaps through her body.
"Then, then—?" she gasped thickly, "Kent is—?"
"Of course. By this time he must be home, wondering what ever happened to you. But please, Mrs. Chandler—please listen to me! Get your husband to pack up first thing in the morning and forget all about the railroad. Maybe you'd better stay here, and let young Shannon go down to warn him. It would be safer that way."
But Jane was beyond hearing. Kent was alive, and home. Thank God! Thank God! He must have left the house for some reasons, come back after she had gone. What a silly fool she had been, imagining up such dreadful pictures! How Kent would laugh! How he would pat her head and call her a little goose with just the right, tender intonation. Everlasting Fayre? The flickering lights she had seen on Thunder Mountain? Illusions, phantasms conjured up in her fevered brain by the stories she had heard in the village, by the shadows and rawness of her nerves. Shannon had been right. It was all poppycock.
She flew, rather than ran, to the front door. She jerked back the bolts, darted out onto the sidewalk. Her heels made rapid, clicking sounds in the silence of the blank, dead-seeming village. She did not see or hear. All her thoughts were focused on the cottage from which she had fled so crazily only an hour before. Kent would be worried when he came back, and found her gone.
Shannon shouted after her. "Wait, Mrs. Chandler! Wait for me!" But the pounding noise of her heels on stone went on and on. The young man raced for the door.
"Don't go!" Tracy shrieked. "They'll get you too!"
Jane was already a dim, disappearing shape down the road. Shannon cursed and went flogging after her. He did not see the darker shadow dissociate itself from the tall hedge as he pounded past, trying to catch up with the girl who hurried ahead. He did not hear the swish of the short, black object as it descended straight for the back of his head. There was a dull, smashing thud, and Shannon's knees buckled under him. He crumpled to the pavement, lay there unstirring. The blur of shadow chuckled fiendishly. Other shadows, seemingly part of hedge and walls, floated away from their moorings, clustered around the stricken figure. They bent over him slowly...
JANE hurried on, unknowing. The thought of Kent sang in her veins, infused her limbs with the wine of vigor. She was no longer tired; no longer frightened. The cottage—and Kent—waited for her around the next bend. She even laughed happily. The night was no longer filled with rustling terrors, with stealthy Things that moved as she moved. It had been a nightmare, a queer, strange dream from which she was now awakened.
See! The road had swung in its great arc, and there, straight ahead, unencumbered by shrouding trees, was the little three-room cottage. Her heart bounded madly, and she increased her pace.
There was a light shining through the window. A light, where, on her last dreadful journey, there had been darkness and terror. Kent was home, waiting, wondering. The thought of his strong arms around her made her choke with happiness.
She raced up the cinder path, loving the good, crunching sound beneath her shoes. The door yielded to her eager thrust readily and easily. She ran into the living room, calling gladly. "Kent! Kent! I am here. It's Jane!"
The fire was dead on the hearth, but the lamp was a bright, yellow glow. The wick had been trimmed of its char and there was no odor of quenched kerosene. The plans were still stretched on the table, carefully, neatly, nothing out of its place.
But Kent was not in the room. Jane ran for the stairs that led upward to the tiny bedroom under the slanting roof. She shouted again, hopefully. Of course, he had gone up for a minute to get something. Another pipe, perhaps; his smoking jacket. They were still not completely settled in the cabin. They had only come to Devil's Gap the day before. Jerry Shannon was to sleep downstairs, on the couch, until the barracks could be made comfortable for the laborers that were due tomorrow.
Strange that there was no answer! The house was very quiet. Not a sound anywhere. A little fear gathered in her pulsing heart, threatened to grow... She pushed it away determinedly.
Kent was here, had been here. There was no doubt of that. His pipe, the pipe that never left his hand, was on the table, bowl resting against the sleek smoothness of the ash-tray. She ran over, touched it, sobbed happily at the warmth that still ebbed from the briar. It had been recently smoked.
She was being silly again. Kent had worried about her, had tired of waiting. He had gone down to the road. Somehow she had missed him. He would be back soon. She would go to the window, call...
Her eyes froze as she swung around. There, on the smooth, waxed surface of the floor, near the chair in which Kent had worked, a long, keen-bladed hunting-knife quivered like a live, uncanny thing. Its needle point was imbedded deeply in the wood. Its razor-edge was red and sticky.
For the moment Jane did not understand. Just a second before, she had been entirely happy, and now...! Almost uncomprehendingly, her eyes moved dully along the floor. From the chair, in a thin, gruesome trail, it led—a dark red, sinuous trail, as if a man had staggered drunkenly, drip—drip—dripping all the way, shedding his life blood as he moved.
Blood, that's what it is—her straining senses shrieked suddenly to her—the blood of the man you love, done to death by that flung, still-quivering dagger. See how the dreadful trail leads on and on, across the room, out through the door, out into the night, out to where the vengeful Things who inhabit the recesses of the Gap have dragged him with unholy glee!
Terrible sobs racked Jane's slender frame. If only she had waited—if only she had not run insanely to the village—she would have been with him; this would not have happened. It was too late now. This time, Kent was dead, slain by demons who resented the bridge he intended rebuilding over their ghastly haunts; slain by the curse that had been pronounced against Henry Stanford and all his kin.
She moved rigidly toward the door. Vague thoughts whirled through her half-mad mind. She would climb Thunder Mountain; she would descend into the frightful chasm; she would choke barehanded the Evil Things who had done this to her husband.
Her stiffened fingers gripped the door knob, froze suddenly. The round, smooth knob was turning slowly in the dry palm of her hand. Someone outside was trying stealthily to open the door!
JANE clung desperately to the slippery metal. Her lungs whistled with tortured breath; her heart banged furiously against her ribs. The pressure increased from outside the door; there was a faint, scuffing noise. The knob kept on turning. In another instant...! The girl's left hand swung up, slammed the heavy wooden bolt into its socket.
For a moment, she sagged limp and weak against the barrier; then she shrank back from its thin protection. The knob rattled suddenly, loudly. The scuffing noise increased. Smash! The pine door quivered on its hinges. Crash! The bolt shook violently in its socket; a hinge sagged askew. Another such tremendous blow and the door would be down.
Jane whimpered. The muscles of her larynx were tight with fear. She looked around madly. Where could she hide; how could she escape the menacing Thing outside? She heard heavy thuds as it moved back along the porch. There was a faint, snuffling sound as of stertorous breathing.
Her gaze fell on the window that faced the upper road. A wild hope filled her throbbing veins. If she could climb out, while the eerie prowler had his attention still fixed on the door...! She raced noiselessly to the oblong frame. Her hand twisted frantically at the latch, froze.
A face peered in at her, a face half-hidden in shadow. Eyes bored into her very soul, shriveling it into tiny bits. There was unutterable hate in those incandescent eyes.
She fell back with a cry. This escape was cut off. Already the heavy thump-thump on the porch meant that the next instant might be too late. The other window—the one to the rear! It was her last chance!
Sobbing, panting, she hurled herself across the room, to the recess near the stairs. She grasped the curtain with terror-strong hands, ripped it off. A hopeless moan escaped her pallid lips.
Framed in the narrow section of glass, glowing eerily in the flare from the table lamp, was still another face. Its nose was flattened against the pane; its eyes were twin pits of madness. It raised a long, skinny arm, sent it smashing against the window. Glass shattered.
Jane whirled back into the center of the room, whimpering once more, glaring from side to side. There was no hope, no escape, anywhere! Glass smashed from the other pane. A leg heaved over the sill. Then a great, booming voice sheathed her shuddering limbs in a coating of ice. The door had fallen in a cloud of dust and splintering wood.
A figure moved stealthily into the room. Grey parchment seemed to form its face—parchment grey as the bellies of fish who have long been dead. Shaggy hair and once-tawny beard were stiff with blood and grave-mold; eyes burned like bottomless pits of Hell. Slowly the apparition came for the fainting girl—the corpse who once had been Everlasting Fayre!
Through the shattered windows came other figures, weird and horrible. Through the door, following their Master, crept more and more of them in an endless parade. The dead preacher was upon her now. Stony figures clutched at her waist, jerked her close to the carrion breast. Flesh and blood could stand no more. With a long moan of agony, Jane fainted limply into the monster's arms.
Around her and the Thing that held her, the creatures of the night danced and leaped, mouthing weird, indistinguishable words...
KENT CHANDLER pushed his way slowly and painfully through the brambles that clothed the lower flanks of Thunder Mountain. His left shoulder was a raw ache of fire; blood oozed steadily through his soaked shirt. His legs sagged wearily beneath him, but indomitable will and cold fury at his unknown, unseen assailant kept him flogging onward.
A low-hanging branch whipped against his wounded shoulder, brought a fiery mist of agony before his eyes. His senses reeled with loss of blood; he stumbled, fell heavily heaved himself up unsteadily and groped on again. This was the place where the sinister shadow had disappeared after the knife had been flung at him through the silently opened door.
What did it all mean? First there had been strange, flickering lights on Thunder Mountain. He had seen them through the window as he worked out his plans. Jane had gone to the village, shopping, only a little while before.
His first thought had been the trestle over Devil's Gap, that sinister, almost bottomless slash which separated the village from the upper peak of the mountain. Part had been destroyed by the fanatic, half-crazed villagers after the tragedy. But the supporting arch was still intact, still jutted half way over the gorge. His plans called for utilizing it in the final structure. Suppose those bodiless, yellow flares meant trouble for the trestle?
Kent's mouth had gone grim, but a stiff, scrambling climb up the mountainside had disclosed nothing. The lights had vanished. Only the thunder rumbled in the distance and the lightning slashed across the distant peak, as now. Nothing else. The trestle loomed dark and silent; the depths of the Gap were pools of fathomless silence.
He had returned to the cabin, puzzled, troubled. The lamp had gone out in his absence. He trimmed the wick, lit it again. He scowled over his plans, pipe in mouth. Queer that Jane hadn't returned yet. It shouldn't have taken her so long to do a little shopping. For the first time in his life, Kent felt uneasy, afraid. Premonitions assailed him; the strange stories of demons in the Gap, of the steel cable they had broken with unhuman fingers, of Everlasting Fayre, the fanatic preacher who had died with the others, all rose to plague him. He had laughed at them, but now...
If he had not moved quickly, the knife would have penetrated his heart. As it was, it slashed through his shoulder and fell clattering to the floor.
Perhaps he should go back now. He would never find the Thing that had attacked him on this night-shrouded mountainside. He wiped the sweat from his brow. Lightning flashed ominously overhead, but the thunder had died. His slow progress through the underbrush made a sound loud in his ears. He crawled on and on for what seemed endless hours. He no longer knew where he was or where he was heading. The pain in his shoulder grew more excruciating. Every move was an effort...
STRANGE noises surrounded him in the night, rustled in his back trail. He clenched his teeth, bit his lips to bring clarity again to his brain. He must not get delirious. He must get back to the cabin, to Jane. Poor Jane! She would worry over his absence. He must get back; must—get—back!
The rustlings increased; the darkness grew more and more impenetrable. There were whispers too, voices calling. He shook his head violently. No, no! It was merely the wind, the thunder rumbling once more. If he started hearing things now... But they were voices, his shrieking brain insisted. The voices of demons come out of the depths, luring him on to destruction. He, Kent Chandler, had mocked them, denied their existence, invaded their privacy again with bridge and rails and humankind. Now they had him in their power.
Oh Lord, if only his shoulder didn't hurt; if only he knew where he was! He had been a fool to chase a wraith. It had lured him deeper, deeper...
Blue flame leaped madly across the sky, bathing trees and slope with uncanny light. Kent's foot poised for the forward step, jerked back in an instinctive spasm of startled fear. Beneath was emptiness—black and bottomless—The very verge of the perpendicular slash of the Gap. Far below—so far away it could barely be heard—came the thin murmur of the stream that rushed through the bowels of the earth.
Kent trembled violently. Sweat drenched his limbs. Only the sudden blaze of the heavens had saved him from being dashed to terrible destruction. Dread enfolded him in a gruesome winding-sheet. The Things that infested the depths had almost got him. Those murmurs, those voices...
Great God! Was he still dreaming, still delirious? Over to the left, through the intervening network of brambles, came a new sound. Thud—bump—thud!
He shrank against the nearest tree, pulse hammering. They were coming for him openly now; they were swarming out of their ancient home to drag this human invader down into the depths.
The noise grew louder. The creaking increased, the thudding became a thunder. Kent pushed his aching body blindly into the darkness. He must get away, must..!
He banged his wounded shoulder into unseen trees, ripped his face and arms on treacherous thorns, slipped and fell and was up again, running madly down the slope, away from the Gap.
But the noise grew ever louder. It filled the universe with hideous din. Kent crashed into a tree, moaned, swayed unsteadily. He could go no farther. Let them come, let them...!
The noise stopped suddenly, close to where he was, almost as close as breathing. There was dreadful, straining silence, in which Kent tried to control the pounding of his blood, the gasping of his lungs.
Then he was hearing things again. Voices, human voices, whispering to each other, not rising above a monotone, as if fearful of being overheard. What were human beings doing here in the remote recesses of the woods, muttering at night?
A strange sound rose high in the air. The whinny of a horse. Kent crouched against the tree, glaring into the darkness. Now he knew he was crazy.
Someone said, low but clear: "Shut up, you fool!"
Dim memories struggled in the recesses of his fuddled brain. That voice, that tone! Impossible, yet—
KENT dragged his leaden limbs forward as quietly as he could. His numb fingers parted the underbrush. His shoulder was a huge ache, but he did not heed. Little fingers of electric blue darted across the sky. The dull, black clouds bellied with unshed rain.
Kent pulled his head back quickly. The road was there, the road that skirted the impassable Gap and wound up and up into the hills. The road by which Zeke Lowe trucked supplies into the back country.
And there, quiescent in the rubble-strewn path, was a team of horses, pawing the ground with iron-shod hooves. Zeke Lowe stood beside his wagon, tall and gaunt and greyish in the glare of the quivering sky. There was a snarl of triumph on his black-stubbled face.
Next to him, small and dapper, chuckling in his throat, muttering words that could not be heard, was William Kirkland, representative of the C.R.&R. Railroad!
Kent tried to think, but his thoughts were a grinding torture. What were these two doing here, on the lonely mountain road, heads together in mysterious whispering? What business had they that required such secrecy? His eyes narrowed. He had almost exposed himself, asked for assistance to get back home. Now...
Something rustled behind him—a thin, slithering sound, as of someone parting branches with infinite stealth.
He swung around weakly. A huge, menacing shape blacked out the greyness of the sky. Kent jerked his wounded hand up to cushion the blow. He cried out involuntarily. Far off, as in a dream, he heard startled voices, the thud of flesh against wood, the quick, smashing sound of wheels and pounding, galloping hooves.
Then the sky fell heavily upon him. A white hot iron lanced through his wound. His head flared into coruscating rockets...
The moving air brought dull awareness back to Kent. His head lolled downward, his body jogged up and down in queer motion. He was being carried through the woods.
He tried to move, but his muscles were numb and unresponsive. His shoulder was a great gout of flame; his skull a tearing agony. The Thing that had captured him made crashing noises as it strode through the underbrush. Weird, unhuman chuckles oozed from its throat, sent shivers of dread up and down Kent's spine.
Then, suddenly, the creature ceased its advance. Kent felt his body heaving upward. A branch slashed his face, brought a measure of consciousness to him. He squirmed crazily, swung his head around. A wild scream tore from his throat. He tried to fling his leaden body backward, away from what he had seen disclosed in the lacing network of lightning.
Beneath his pendulous body yawned black, avid horror—the sinister chasm called Devil's Gap! The Thing grunted, dug steel-strong fingers into his aching flesh, swung him struggling out, out...!
Kent twisted in an agony of effort. He clawed with hands and knees. Suddenly the Thing relaxed its grip. Kent's fingers clutched desperately at cloth. There was a rending, tearing sound. Then he was falling, falling into the deep abyss, tumbling over and over in the air.
His blood churned with the noise of the upward-rushing air; his ears filled with the ominous roar of the boulder-strewn stream a thousand feet beneath. A loud laugh, unhuman, terrible, filled the gorge with demoniac echoes. Then he crashed heavily into unyielding rock, and a black wave of nothingness engulfed his body...
JANE CHANDLER moaned faintly. The pit of her stomach heaved and kneaded. She was deathly sick. The grey sea in which she weltered seemed interminable. A quiver ran through her slender body. Faint thoughts muddied the blankness of her mind. She tried to move her weightless limbs. They did not budge. Red hot needles stuck in her aching eyeballs, stabbed with fiendish torture into her skull. Her eyelids were lead-heavy as she forced them open.
Where was she, what had happened to her? She looked around in bewilderment, not understanding. Unrelieved darkness surrounded her. Walls hemmed her in with damp mustiness, with the staleness of long disuse. Not a glimmer of light showed anywhere. She tried to move but her tender flesh was bruised against invisible barriers and quivered into painful quiescence.
Realization of the full horror of her situation struck Jane then. She was trussed up like a calf for the slaughter, arms bound rigidly to her sides. Cold, damp stone was beneath her, rasping her skin, congealing her blood with icy bands.
Despair filled her like a cancerous growth. Kent was dead, killed by unholy Things that crept in the night, while she...! A sob swelled the muscles of her throat. She remembered now. The dreadful apparition of Everlasting Fayre, the grave-chill grip of his corpse fingers, the dim-seen leaping, gesticulating figures just before she fainted. Oh God, she moaned, what are they going to do to me, what...?
Something fumbled in the nearby darkness. The sound rasped her eardrums, shrilled its message of fear to her brain. They were coming for her now. The final chapter of her agony was about to begin. Dear God, she could not stand any more. If only she would go mercifully mad, would die before they came!
The darkness grated audibly, and she saw an oblong form open into murky light. Distorted shadows swarmed inside; they danced on the ill-lit walls; they slithered over rusty iron and round-bellied shapes and wheels and sagging leather belts. Outside, the sky was a fuliginous glare, stabbed occasionally with yellow light.
Jane shivered with new-found fears. She knew where she was now. She had been taken to the power-room of her father's abandoned railroad—where the engines had strained and heaved as the great steel cable hauled the line of cars up the terrific slope, and twisted like writhing serpents around the cable drums. Now they were silent and rusted, the haunt of dead men and the sinister denizens of the chasm.
The dim, flickering light suddenly blanked out. A shape filled the panel, moved toward her with clumping, solid steps. Its breathing was loud and ominous. Jane shrank with a strangled gasp against the bruising cords that bound her. Why didn't she die, before...!
The figure bulked over her. Huge arms whipped around her quivering form, lifted her up. Her skin crawled at the contact, an ecstasy of terror froze her blood. But the corpse of the preacher smothered her screams against his long-dead bosom, clumped through the door out into the night.
The rushing wind furrowed her bloodless cheeks, whipped through her hair. It howled with demoniac glee. Crash after crash reached her ears, went rumbling with cataclysmic thunder between beetling crags. Incessant lightning sheeted the gash of the canyon with an insane glare, enveloped sky and earth and mountains in a ghastly flame. The demons of the storm blazed over Devil's Gap and Thunder Mountain.
The Thing that had once been Fayre dropped the girl heavily to the ground. With a low moan, she struggled to a sitting position, her back against the wall of the mountain. Dear God in Heaven! Was this the ultimate horror?
CURVING steel rails dropped between precipitous cliffs to the very edge of nothingness. Once there had been a bridge, now there was only the dreadful void. But it wasn't this that made her skull grind into a thousand fragments; it wasn't the wild fury of the onrushing storm that made her throat ache with strangled cries and her skin grow parchment-stiff. It was the huge semi-circle of demoniac forms alongside the rusted rails that exploded her senses into madness.
They screeched with unhuman frenzy at the sight of her. They tossed their skinny arms high into the air, waved torches that flared sootily in the darkness. They brandished knives like that which had sucked her husband's blood; they leaped and cavorted and mouthed unutterable foulness.
The lurid glare of the pitch-pine torches, the jagged lances of coruscating lightning, blurred the hideous obscenity of those pit-born creatures, made them a shrieking, swaying haze to the fainting girl.
Jane knew what they were without seeing. The very thought shriveled her brain with its fiery torment. They were the devils who lurked in the noisome depths of the Gap; they had left their lairs in obedience to the Thing who had lived and died as Fayre.
He stood in front of her, rigid, his face a hideous, frozen mask; his eyes twin jets of hellish hate. His beard did not ruffle in the wind; it stood out straight and stiff and streaked with gore.
"Accursed daughter of an accursed father," he mouthed in dreadful accents, "you have dared return to the scene of his crime. You came with husband and assistant to rebuild what the demons of the Gap had once destroyed in their righteous wrath!"
His voice rose fanatically against the whistling of the wind, the racketing, clattering thunder, the approving shrieks of the swarming creatures along the track.
"It was not enough that your father defiled the sacred haunts of the spirits for his private greed; it was not enough that he mocked and scorned me in life when I prophesied evil on his sacrilegious venture—but in his mad desire for money, he used cheap, inferior steel for the cable."
Jane jerked erect. For the moment fear ebbed from her frozen limbs. The voice from the grave had accused the father she adored of a terrible thing. "It's a lie!" she flamed. "Every inch of that cable was tested for ten times the load it was to haul."
"Silence, woman!" the corpse figure thundered. Its grey mask was hideous in its malignancy.
"Silence!" echoed the ghastly swarm in demoniac chorus.
Jane fell back against the rock. Terror sheathed her limbs in ice again. For one terrible instant, the long line had surged forward, torches high in the wind, as if they would rend her into lumps of bleeding flesh for her audacity.
But the dead preacher waved them back. "Wait!" he said hollowly. "She must hear of her sins, of the curse that has befallen Henry Stanford and all his kin, while she cowers, shrieking and praying for mercy, at the doom that awaits her."
A growl ran through the rank of Things from Hell, a growl choked with gloating expectation.
Fayre's corpse went on in dreadful tones: "Those poor little children, those women who heeded not the voice of their preacher! I exhorted, I warned, I denounced, but they in their folly would go by the hellish steel road to the hills. I went with them, knowing that I held power over the spirits of the Gap. But the cable that Henry Stanford furnished snapped like a piece of rotten thread. Down, down into the bottomless pit they fell, screaming and whirling and bouncing against the unfeeling rock, to be crushed into shapeless flesh and bones. And I, Everlasting Fayre, preacher and man who had walked with God, fell with them."
An eerie wail rose from the crowding demons, a wail that changed instantly into wild shrieks for vengeance against the cowering girl. They surged forward again, hair streaming in savage wildness, torches tossing and waving in the wind of their motion.
Jane cried out desperately: "God in Heaven, save me! Don't let them touch me!"
"God has deserted the tribe of Henry Stanford," the dead Thing shouted. "He has delivered you up to the wrath of those whom your father butchered. He caused you to harden your heart; he caused you to return in your lust for the wealth you thought was hidden in these accursed rails. Even now your husband lies, broken and shattered, in the uttermost reaches of the Gap."
JANE'S skull tightened on the groaning substance of her brain. Her heart stopped its wild pounding, became a frozen lump in her bosom. Kent was dead. Never again would his dear arms hold her body against him; never again would his lips seek hers. These demons of darkness and Hell had battered him into a gory mass. The vision of his sightless eyes staring up at a merciless sky—a prey to obscene vultures and the beasts of the night—rocked her reason.
The whole horrible scene—the darkling crags, the rusty steel rails, the blazing heavens, the tossing torches, the Thing that had risen from its unquiet grave, the howling, distorted demons of the Gap—blurred before her pain-swept eyes in a rocking, reeling phantasmagoria of madness.
She was beyond mere terror, beyond mere mortal suffering now. The thread of her being had snapped. Let them glut their will on her fainting body, let them tear her limb from limb, it did not matter any more. Kent, whom she loved more than life itself, was dead!
The voice of the risen corpse pierced her blood-hazed senses. "She is the daughter of the arch-criminal. It is fitting, therefore, that the curse overwhelm her in all its fury. But first, there is that other, the fool who would not go while there was yet time. Let him be disposed of now."
The night became livid with snarls and wordless cries. Unhuman feet pounded and stamped. Dazzling light streaked across the shut eyelids of the swooning girl. Then came another sound, a strange, screeching noise that penetrated her fuddled brain with splinters of new fear; a sound that dulled even the crashing thunder.
It was the unmistakable pound of steel wheels on rails! As if—and the dreadful thought etched like burning acid into her tender tissues—as if a train were rolling along the abandoned roadbed, a grisly train such as the groaning earth had never borne before.
Jane shook her head insanely. It was a mockery, a hideous figment of her disordered imagination. It could not, it must not be! No horror that Hell could vomit forth could equal the gruesomeness of this ghastly train. But the noise grew louder, more overwhelming. The solid rock seemed to quiver with the rolling thunder of the steel. She squeezed her eyelids tighter; she did not want to see what it was. But her shattered senses shrieked the horror to her, conjured up the frightful picture.
It was the train on which a hundred women and children had embarked happily for the promised outing beyond the hills. That train had been packed to overflowing with chattering, laughing humanity. It had rattled across the lightless canyon under the strong, steady pull of a great steel cable.
Now it had come back—a ghostly, thudding Thing—to torture her to utter madness with its freight of gibbering dead, its fleshless skeletons with pitted holes for eyes, its shattered bodies that had once been women and little children. They had all come back to mouth lipless curses against the girl whose father had sent them to their doom.
Oh God, she could not stand it! Anything but that! She tried to crush herself into the unfeeling rock; already she felt, through tight-closed lids, the accusing daggers of those awful eyes.
The shrieks of the demon horde rose to a roar of frenzy. The banging wheels grew loud as the crash of fate, stopped suddenly at her very side. Jane whimpered and huddled low. Soon that awful freight would disgorge, would advance on her with clawing bones and faceless purpose...!
"Jane! Mrs. Chandler!"
The startled cry burst through the din with whelming concussions, stabbed her senses as if with slashing knives. That voice...!
Jane's delirium fell from her like an outworn cloak; her insane vision fled into vaporous nothingness. She forced her eyelids open. Then she shrieked!
ON the rusty rails, not ten feet away from where she sat, roped and helpless, stood a huge double-wheel of steel. Its one rim hugged the outer rail, its second gripped with shiny luster the inner track. Between the wheels was a concave surface, held in place by the mighty axle. It was the great steel drum over which the cable had twisted when cars were to be hauled up the terrific slope.
But it was not the sight of the cable drum that had brought a scream ripping through her lips. It was the figure of the man who lay extended over the concavity of the inner drum. The man who was stretched in a great, curving arc, like a bow bent for the arrow; whose body was a network of stout, lashed ropes.
The prisoner was Jerry Shannon!
His head was a clotted mass of blood, his face, ordinarily round and freckled, was a tight-drawn mask of pain and suffering. His eyes clung to the wife of his chief with a horrified wideness that Jane knew was not for himself.
His swollen lips moved with difficulty. "Jane!" he whispered, "they have you, too!"
"Jerry," she cried wildly. "Oh, my God! You mustn't die; the curse was not on you. You're just—just—" She choked, turned her head toward the dead preacher. "You must let him go," she pleaded. "Do what you will with me, but let him free. He has nothing to do with the railroad; he is not our kin. He will leave Devil's Gap and never return, I promise you."
In her frenzy, she was appealing to corpses which had no souls, no human emotions, to fallen spirits whom God and Heaven had rejected; appealing to them for mercy!
Jerry reared his head against the ropes that crossed his throat. Fire blazed from his eyes. His voice was strong and vigorous.
"Never, Jane! I do not abandon Kent, or you, or the railroad! I make no promises. Devils from Hell," he shouted, "I defy you! Do your worst! But she—Mrs. Chandler—she—" A spasm contorted his face, strangled the words in his throat. Bright blood frothed from his blued lips. He fell back, head lolling.
The soulless Thing called Everlasting Fayre raised his hand. "It is too late. All must pay the penalty of the curse. Man and woman alike—what do they matter to the dead?"
His heavy tread was thunderously loud in Jane's ears. His corpse-grey arm extended, pushed strongly against the cable drum. It swayed, started to roll down the steep incline.
"No, no!" Jane screamed. "Not that! Great merciful God!"
The wheel turned slowly. The twitching body of Jerry Shannon went with it. Over and up again. His bleeding head emerged, swung upward with the revolving drum. A wan, tight grin colored the waxen pallor of his cheeks. His lips parted. A last fluttering whisper came to the straining, horror-filled girl.
"Goodbye, Jane!"
Then the wheel spun again, and his arched body turned over. Slowly at first, with dreadful deliberation, then faster and faster, as the drum gained momentum on the twin rails down the steep descent. Over and over and over, whirling with a pounding clangor of steel against steel, slamming down the abandoned tracks, spinning in a blur of moving parts and shuddering human flesh until...!
Jane's skull exploded into a million showering sparks. There, at the very end of the trail, where the trestle had once spanned the Gap, was black, yawning void.
The revolving drum with its human victim thundered to the edge, leaped into space, fell in a frightful flat arc to the fathomless depths below. The last thing Jane heard before she fainted was the fierce ululation from a score of unhuman throats...
HANDS shook Jane's gelid body. Voices clamored in the grey blankness of her mind. As in a dream, she felt herself lifted. Her feet dragged along the ground. Fingers gripped her arms, propelled her along.
Still dazed, she heard the confusion of voices grow until they beat down the rattling thunder that echoed among the mountains. Returning circulation pricked the numbness of her unbound, dangling legs as if with myriad needles. Dim hope shuddered through her darkened mind. Somehow, she lifted the unbearable weight of her head, opened her eyes.
Two men held her up, were hurrying her along. Two human beings. Her eyes darted unbelievingly from one to the other. The little flicker of hope flared into wild, delirious joy. She recognized them. Walt Eben, flaxen-haired, flaxen-mustached, a farmer who had lived, a sullen recluse, on the outskirts of the village ever since his wife and three children had died in the Gap. And Joel Harris, mountainous and heavy of face, the local quarryman. He too had been a trifle queer since his motherless daughter had been buried in the cemetery.
Jane's heart fluttered like a tiny prisoned bird at the near prospect of release. These were no demons of the Gap, no Thing who should be at rest beneath a graven headstone. They were flesh and blood, even as she. They had saved her from an awful death, from—
"Eben! Harris! Thank God you came! Thank God you...!"
Why didn't they answer? Why didn't they turn their heads and smile, friendly greetings into her still-tortured eyes? Why did they grip her arms with brutal, tearing fingers, dragging her along the jagged, flinty rock?
She choked off suddenly, peered wildly from one to the other. The lightning still flared, illuminating the ghastly scene. Their faces were hard and lined, their foreheads wrinkled in grim sneers, their nostrils twitched with queer jerks. Then they turned simultaneously toward her.
Jane felt herself cold all over. Her limbs gave way and dragged, bumping and bruising, over the hard, unfeeling ground. These were not the men she had known the year before, the men who had greeted her respectfully as she has passed on the village street. These were strangers, demons in human form.
Hate blazed from their eyes, spittle drooled from their gaping lips. Unintelligible, animal snarls rumbled in the cavity of their throats. Jane's eyes shuddered away from their madness, focused on the dreadful picture straight ahead.
The gruesome horde still lined the railroad track. Torches still sizzled and crackled with burning pitch in skinny hands. But they were all quiet now. They leaned forward with avid eagerness, gloating with insane fanaticism on her slender, dragging body. Jane's mind went dark. She knew now the awful truth.
These demons of the Gap—these creatures of the night who had sent Kent to his death and whirled Jerry into the frightful depths—they were no Things of another world. She knew them, even in the fantastic flare of the torches, even with their madness thick upon them; she knew each one by name and occupation. They were all men from the village, men who had retreated from her as a thing accursed when she entered the single street, long, dim hours before. They were the same men who had strangely vanished when she came out again from Abner Tracy's store.
The corpse loomed before her—the soulless outer vestments of Everlasting Fayre. The grave-grey of his skin made her flesh crawl. The glutted hate of his pitted eyes seared her very soul. His hand was extended upward—like a prophet of evil, like a dead instrument of Hell.
There was no mercy anywhere. The heavens themselves seemed to mock her torment with thunderous laughter. These swarming creatures were men, but no longer sane. Their minds had cracked from long brooding on the tragedy that had engulfed their dear ones. Their madness had grown to fanatical heights under the leadership of the preacher who had died and returned from the grave to spur them on to vengeance against those they believed responsible.
It was too late now to explain. They would not hear; they could not listen. A corpse was their leader, and they were mindless automatons governed by a long-dead mind.
"Behold," Fayre thundered, "the final working of the curse! Chandler is dead, Shannon has plunged to eternity; Henry Stanford will never return to the place that haunts his dreams. Now his daughter, last of the accursed clan, last of those who dared to rebuild the railroad, will follow in their path. No more will steel rails and hellish trains disturb the peace and quiet of Devil's Gap; no more will a bridge fling defiance to the unquiet spirits who lurk beneath. Now and forever will your children's bodies, your wives' wailing souls, my own imploring ghost, rest in their narrow homes, content with the retribution you have exacted. Bind the woman to the wheel, let her follow the others into an eternity of suffering."
JANE was jerked forward. Her eyes widened in horror at the sight of the great steel drum. There it stood on the track, quiescent, yet quivering with a strange avidity of its own. Had it returned from its dreadful journey, had it...? But no! She remembered now. There had been two of these drums in the power house. This was the second; the first was twisted steel and ground flesh and bones below.
She flung herself madly around; she screamed, struggled and tore with superhuman strength at the hands that clutched her tight. She would not go to that awful death. Oh God, she cried, why have you deserted me? She begged and implored and shrieked for mercy.
But there was no mercy—could be none—in a corpse; there was none in the wild, fanatic eyes of the villagers. Powerful arms bent her thrashing body over the curve of the wheel; ropes thick and strong wound cruelly over her body.
The horde of crazed villagers streamed back to the line of the track. The torches were sooty, demoniac flares in the wind. Lightning slashed across the sky, died out. A drop of rain splashed into her face. The storm was about to begin.
Nothing mattered now. Soon she would be whirling, a helpless cog on an infernal machine, down the steel rails, hurtling even as poor Jerry had done, into the frightful Gap. A last shriek eddied from her gaping throat, stopped suddenly, even as the dead leader stepped back.
Her madly rolling eyes had detected movement along the outer edge of the gorge. The rocks were piled there in gargantuan blocks. The sooty torches did not penetrate those murky depths. The shadows were thick and ominous.
But a shadow darker than the rest was moving, slithering silently along, merging for an instant with the solid blackness of the faceless rocks, and dissociating itself again in the lurid background of the mountain wall.
Harris jerked the last knot tight. It cut cruelly into her flesh, but Jane did not feel the pain. She watched with desperate fierceness that slow, crawling progress. Perhaps, perhaps...? She clutched at new hope and spewed it forth again. Despair dulled her limbs. Even if that creeping vagueness were a man, what could he do to help against this hideous babble of crazed men, against a creature from the grave itself?
Harris stepped back, so did Eben. They gloated madly on their handiwork; insane maggots crawled in their eyes. Fayre came forward with heavy, doomful clump. It was all over. In another instant...!
A great blaze sheeted the sky. Space seemed a huge cauldron of fire. Jane repressed a shriek that tore at every muscle of her body. The crawling shadow had silhouetted momentarily in that inferno of flame, had lifted its head and stared at her. Then the heaven darkened and blanked him out again.
NOW she knew she was really insane; the unhuman tortures of the night had torn her reason from its moorings. For the face she thought she saw had been the face of Kent Chandler, her husband! Kent, who was dead, whose blood had dyed the waxen polish of the cottage floor, whom the dead preacher had averred lay crushed and lifeless at the bottom of the Gap! This was an apparition from another world, an omen of her own approaching death.
Fayre stood over her, grisly face moveless. His hand extended toward the wheel. A thrust, and...
A figure catapulted into the light, crashed into the soulless body. The dead Thing staggered back.
"Jane, darling!"
She opened her eyes in delirious unbelief. Had another hallucination come to plague her in her last moments? Kent was over her, fingers desperate at her bonds. His head was bloody and his hair disheveled, but he was real—alive!
"Look out, Kent, behind you!" she shrieked.
Kent whirled around, too late. Eben and Harris hurled themselves upon him, dragged him back with powerful, pinioning arms. His wounded shoulder cracked with sickening sound; his left arm went limp. Jane saw the agony on his face, tore wildly at her bonds.
Fayre was at the wheel again. His eyes were glaring balls of insane fury. "Now, you she-devil," he gritted between corpse-teeth, "you and your husband both will die. This time nothing can stop me."
He shoved. The wheel tottered, swayed in unstable equilibrium. Above the howl of the storm, the wilder cries of the village madmen, came Kent's despairing curses, the sound of his struggles.
The cable drum started to move. Jane felt her feet going up, her head down. A last, long scream made the tendons of her throat raw. Horror clamped her in a vise. The trail had ended. Kent had been dead and returned to life. Soon he would die again. And her shattered limbs and bones would mingle with his at the bottom of Devil's Gap.
Her head lolled down. Her body was an insane curve. Her feet were up. Nausea griped her stomach. The great drum had started to roll. Over and over...
Kent's anguished cursing came dimly to her. The leering faces of the madmen who lined the track gloated in their frenzy at the fate which awaited her.
The clamor of their mouthings deafened her ears. She was dizzy now. The wheel was turning a little faster. Everything blurred.
The noise increased suddenly. Thunder cracked, sharp and staccato. The villagers' cries redoubled. There was a new note to them. More thunder. Kent's voice, high, excited, yelling something.
The wheel was going over again. Her body rose into a confusion of wildly tossing torches, of leaping, dashing figures. Weights thudded heavily against the drum to which she was bound. The dizziness became sickness. Her head was down. The wheel had stopped rotating. That meant...? The sky crashed upon her...
SHE opened her eyes to see a remembered form. Arms held her tight.
"Thank God, darling, you're all right." Kent breathed fervently. "For a while I thought..."
His shoulder was bandaged and his left arm in a sling. Khaki-clad men, strangers, moved around with winking flashes. Rain splashed her face, but she didn't care. She snuggled closer to her husband.
"But how did you come back to life, my dear?" she whispered. "And what happened to save us just before...?" She shuddered at the memory of that last dreadful scene, pressed against him.
"In the first place," he grinned, "I wasn't ever dead. If you mean the knife thrown at me in the cottage, it just pinked my shoulder. I chased the thrower—Harris has confessed he was the one—up the mountain, where he outmaneuvered me, and threw me, as he thought, into the Gap. Fortunately, I fell only a dozen feet or so, caught on a tiny ledge. When I came to, I remembered the lights I had seen on the old railroad. The rest of the time I spent in getting here."
"But just before I fainted, everything seemed over," she protested.
A khaki-clad man hurried over. "All the villagers are in custody," he reported. "Two are dead, shot, but the others seem to have come out of their madness. They don't seem to know what happened."
"There's the answer, Jane," Kent told her as the man hurried away again. "State troopers from Meredith, the county seat. They came by special train to Devil's Gap when the call for help flashed through. And here," he continued, turning to two men who stood a bit to one side, "are the ones responsible for calling them. Will Kirkland and Zeke Lowe. They had heard me when I was struck down in the woods, and they had seen enough before to suspect what was taking place." He grinned. "For a while I thought they were the guilty parties. Kirkland is a C.R.&R. man, and Zeke, of course, stood to lose his trucking monopoly when the road was finished. Besides, they were always in conferences."
Kirkland's shrewd, dark face broke into a smile. "I knew Zeke couldn't make a living here after your branch started operation. And Zeke is an old friend of mine. I came to town to make him a proposition to boss a line of motor trucks for my outfit between the river valley and Meredith. He said he'd think it over, and started home. The next thing I heard was that he had gone crazy. Mrs. Chandler told me that. So I went after him."
Zeke grinned sheepishly. "So would you go crazy," he retorted, "if you saw old Everlasting Fayre, who yuh knew was dead and buried, walking down the road, straight for yuh."
Kent's face hardened. "He was responsible for the whole frightful affair. It was he who wrought the villagers to a pitch of madness with his apparitions and his curses. It was he who sent Harris to attack me, and to seize Jane. He wanted to scare us out of Devil's Gap, to stop the rebuilding of the railroad. When he saw he couldn't do that, he decided to kill us off. It was he who cut the cable last year and sent all those people crashing to their deaths. I didn't mention it, but I found the parted strands. They showed signs of a hack-saw. I wanted to investigate the matter quietly."
Jane shivered. "But how could a dead man do all that?"
"Dead man?" Kent echoed grimly. "Look at him!" He arose stiffly, lifted his wife to her feet. They walked unsteadily to where a shape lay, face up, unstirring, in the light of the flashes.
"There's your dead man," Kent pointed. "He's dead enough now."
Jane overcame her repulsion, looked closely. The features were still remarkably like those of Everlasting Fayre, but in places, the thick makeup had washed away under the pelting rain.
It was Abner Tracy!
"I—I don't understand," Jane faltered. "If the railroad went through, it would bring more business to his store, more than he could handle with Lowe's truck."
"That's what everyone thought, and that's what he claimed. But Tracy was smart. He knew it wouldn't work out that way. He saw what happened the first few days the old road operated. The mountaineers didn't stop here; they went on to Meredith for their shopping, where there were bigger and more modern stores. Tracy's business fell off tremendously. That was why he cut the cable the first time. He thought it had settled everything. But when he saw us coming back, he grew desperate. He made up as Fayre to play on the superstitious villagers, to get them to help him in his fiendish plans. This time he was going to make sure that no one would ever think of a railroad again."
Jane suddenly shivered. She clung desperately to her husband. Her lips sought his.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.