Black Hounds of Death (21 page)

“He’s a devil!” raved Brent, clinging to his gun, though not trying to lift it. “He came here to murder us! He lied when he said he came to warn us against a black man. What man would be fool enough to come into Egypt at night, just to warn a stranger? My God, has he got you both fooled? I tell you,
he wears the brand of the hound!”

“Then you know
he’s
here!” cried Ashley.

“Yes; this fiend told me, trying to worm his way into the house. God, Ashley,
he’s
tracked us down, in spite of all our cleverness. We have trapped ourselves! In a city, we might buy protection; but here, in this accursed forest, who will hear our cries or come to our aid when the fiend closes in upon us? What fools—what fools we were to think to hide from
him
in this wilderness!”

“I heard him laugh,” shuddered Ashley. “He taunted us from the bushes in his beast’s voice. I saw the man he killed—ripped and mangled as if by the fangs of Satan himself. What—what are we to do?”

“What can we do except lock ourselves in and fight to the last?” shrieked Brent. His nerves were in frightful shape.

“Please tell me what it is all about?” pleaded the trembling girl.

With a terrible despairing laugh Brent threw out his arm, gesturing toward the black woods beyond the faint light. “A devil in human form is lurking out there!” he exclaimed. “He has tracked me across the world, and has cornered me at last! Do you remember Adam Grimm?”

“The man who went with you to Mongolia five years ago? But he died, you said. You came back without him.”

“I thought he was dead,” muttered Brent. “Listen, I will tell you. Among the black mountains of Inner Mongolia, where no white man had ever penetrated, our expedition was attacked by fanatical devil-worshippers—the black monks of Erlik who dwell in the forgotten and accursed city of Yahlgan. Our guides and servants were killed, and all our stock driven off but one small camel.

“Grimm and I stood them off all day, firing from behind the rocks when they tried to rush us. That night we planned to make a break for it, on the camel that remained to us. But it was evident to me that the beast could not carry us both to safety. One man might have a chance. When darkness fell, I struck Grimm from behind with my gun butt, knocking him senseless. Then I mounted the camel and fled—”

He did not heed the look of sick amazement and abhorrence growing in the girl’s lovely face. Her wide eyes were fixed on her uncle as if she were seeing the real man for the first time, and was stricken by what she saw. He plunged on, too obsessed and engulfed by fear to care or heed what she thought of him. The sight of a soul stripped of its conventional veneer and surface pretense is not always pleasant.

“I broke through the lines of the besiegers and escaped in the night. Grimm, naturally, fell into the hands of the devil-worshippers, and for years I supposed that he was dead. They had the reputation of slaying, by torture, every alien that they captured. Years passed, and I had almost forgotten the episode. Then, seven months ago, I learned that he was alive—was, indeed, back in America, thirsting for my life. The monks had not killed him; through their damnable arts they had
altered
him. The man is no longer wholly human, but his whole soul is bent on my destruction. To appeal to the police would have been useless; he would have tricked them and wreaked his vengeance in spite of them. I fled from him up and down across the country for more than a month, like a hunted animal, and finally, when I thought I had thrown him off the track, I took refuge in this God-forsaken wilderness, among these barbarians, of whom that man Kirby Garfield is a typical example.”

“You
can talk of barbarians!” she flamed, and her scorn would have cut the soul of any man who was not so totally engrossed in his own fears.

She turned to me. “Mr. Garfield, please come in. You must not try to traverse this forest at night, with that fiend at large.”

“No!” shrieked Brent. “Get back from that door, you little fool! Ashley, hold your tongue. I tell you, he is one of Adam Grimm’s creatures! He shall not set foot in this cabin!”

She looked at me, pale, helpless and forlorn, and I pitied her as I despised Richard Brent; she looked so small and bewildered.

“I wouldn’t sleep in your cabin if all the wolves of Hell were howling outside,” I snarled at Brent. “I’m going, and if you shoot me in the back, I’ll kill you before I die. I wouldn’t have come back at all, but the young lady needed my protection. She needs it now, but it’s your privilege to deny her that. Miss Brent,” I said, “if you wish, I’ll come back tomorrow with a buckboard and carry you to the village. You’d better go back to New York.”

“Ashley will take her to the village,” roared Brent, “Damn you,
will
you go?”

With a sneer that brought the blood purpling his countenance, I turned squarely upon him and strode off. The door banged behind me, and I heard his falsetto voice mingled with the tearful accents of his niece. Poor girl, it must have been like a nightmare to her: to have been snatched out of her sheltered urban life and dropped down in a country strange and primitive to her, among people whose ways seemed incredibly savage and violent, and into a bloody episode of wrong and menace and vengeance. The deep pinelands of the Southwest seem strange and alien enough at any time to the average Eastern city-dweller; and added to their gloomy mystery and primordial wildness was this grim phantom out of an unsuspected past, like the figment of a nightmare.

I turned squarely about, stood motionless in the black trail, staring back at the pinpoint of light which still winked through the trees. Peril hovered over the cabin in that tiny clearing, and it was no part of a white man to leave that girl with the protection of none but her half-lunatic uncle and his servant. Ashley looked like a fighter. But Brent was an unpredictable quantity. I believed he was tinged with madness. His insane rages and equally insane suspicions seemed to indicate as much. I had no sympathy for him. A man who would sacrifice his friend to save his own life deserves death.

But evidently Grimm was mad. His slaughter of Jim Tike suggested homicidal insanity. Poor Jim Tike had never wronged him. I would have killed Grimm for that murder, alone, if I had had the opportunity. And I did not intend that the girl should suffer for the sins of her uncle. If Brent had not sent that telegram, as he swore, then it looked much as if she had been summoned for a sinister purpose. Who but Grimm himself would have summoned her, to share the doom he planned for Richard Brent?

Turning, I strode back down the trail. If I could not enter the cabin, I could at least lurk in the shadows ready at hand if my help was needed. A few moments later I was under the fringe of trees that ringed the clearing.

Light still shone through the cracks in the shutters, and at one place a portion of the windowpane was visible. And even as I looked, this pane was shattered, as if something had been hurled through it. Instantly the night was split by a sheet of flame that burst in a blinding flash out of the doors and windows and chimney of the cabin. For one infinitesimal instant I saw the cabin limned blackly against the tongues of flame that flashed from it. With the flash came the thought that the cabin had been blown up—but no sound accompanied the explosion.

Even while the blaze was still in my eyes, another explosion filled the universe with blinding sparks, and this one was accompanied by a thunderous reverberation. Consciousness was blotted out too suddenly for me to know that I had been struck on the head from behind, terrifically and without warning.

3.
Black Hands

A flickering light was the first thing that impressed itself upon my awakening faculties. I blinked, shook my head, came suddenly fully awake. I was lying on my back in a small glade, walled by towering black trees which fitfully reflected the uncertain light that emanated from a torch stuck upright in the earth near me. My head throbbed, and blood clotted my scalp; my hands were fastened together before me by a pair of handcuffs. My clothes were torn and my skin scratched as if I had been dragged brutally through the brush.

A huge black shape squatted over me—a black man of medium height but of gigantic breadth and thickness, clad only in ragged, muddy breeches—Tope Braxton. He held a gun in each hand, and alternately aimed first one and then the other at me, squinting along the barrel. One pistol was mine; the other had once belonged to the constable that Braxton had brained.

I lay silent for a moment, studying the play of the torchlight on the great black torso. His huge body gleamed shiny ebony or dull bronze as the light flickered. He was like a shape from the abyss whence mankind crawled ages ago. His primitive ferocity was reflected in the bulging knots of muscles that corded his long, massive apish arms, his huge sloping shoulders; above all the bullet-shaped head that jutted forward on a column-like neck. The wide, flat nostrils, murky eyes, thick lips that writhed back from tusk-like teeth—all proclaimed the man’s kinship with the primordial.

“Where the devil do you fit into this nightmare?” I demanded.

He showed his teeth in an ape-like grin.

“I thought it was time you was comin’ to, Kirby Garfield,” he grinned. “I wanted you to come to ’fo’ I kill you, so you know
who
kill you. Den I go back and watch Mistuh Grimm kill de ol’ man and de gal.”

“What do you mean, you black devil?” I demanded harshly. “Grimm? What do you know about Grimm?”

“I meet him in de deep woods, after he kill Jim Tike. I heah a gun fire and come with a torch to see who—thought maybe somebody after me. I meet Mistuh Grimm.”

“So you were the man I saw with the torch,” I grunted.

“Mistuh Grimm smaht man. He say if I help him kill some folks, he help me git away. He take and throw bomb into de cabin; dat bomb don’t kill dem folks, just paralyze ’em. I watchin’ de trail, and hit you when you come back. Dat man Ashley ain’t plumb paralyze, so Mistuh Grimm, he take and bite out he throat like he done Jim Tike.”

“What do you mean, bite out his throat?” I demanded.

“Mistuh Grimm ain’t a human bein’. He stan’ up and walk like a man, but he part hound, or wolf.”

“You mean a werewolf?” I asked, my scalp prickling.

He grinned. “Yeah, dat’s it. Dey had ’em in de old country.” Then he changed his mood. “I done talk long enough. Gwine blow yo’ brains out now!”

His thick lips froze in a killer’s mirthless grin as he squinted along the barrel of the pistol in his right hand. My whole body went tense, as I sought desperately for a loophole to save my life. My legs were not tied, but my hands were manacled, and a single movement would bring hot lead crashing through my brain. In my desperation I plumbed the depths of black folklore for a dim, all but forgotten superstition.

“These handcuffs belonged to Joe Sorley, didn’t they?” I demanded.

“Uh huh,” he grinned, without ceasing to squint along the sights. “I took ’em ’long with his gun after I beat his head in with window-bar. I thought I might need ’em.”

“Well,” I said, “if you kill me while I’m wearing them, you’re eternally damned! Don’t you know that if you kill a man who’s wearing a cross, his ghost will haunt you forever after?”

He jerked the gun down suddenly, and his grin was replaced by a snarl.

“What you mean, white man?”

“Just what I say. There’s a cross scratched on the inside of one of these cuffs. I’ve seen it a thousand times. Now go ahead and shoot, and I’ll haunt you into Hell.”

“Which cuff?” he snarled, lifting a gun-butt threateningly.

“Find out for yourself,” I sneered. “Go ahead; why don’t you shoot? I hope you’ve had plenty of sleep lately, because I’ll see to it that you never sleep again. In the night, under the trees, you’ll see my face leering at you. You’ll hear my voice in the wind that moans through the cypress branches. When you close your eyes in the dark, you’ll feel my fingers at your throat.”

“Shut up!” he roared, brandishing his pistols. His black skin was tinged with an ashy hue.

“Shut me up—if you dare!” I struggled up to a sitting position, and then fell back cursing. “Damn you, my leg’s broken!”

At that the ashy tinge faded from his ebon skin, and purpose rose in his reddish eyes.

“So yo’ leg’s busted!” He bared his glistening teeth in a beastly grin. “Thought you fell mighty hard, and then I dragged you a right smart piece.”

Laying both pistols on the ground, well out of my reach, he rose and leaned over me, dragging a key out of his breeches pocket. His confidence was justified; for was I not unarmed, helpless with a broken leg? I did not need the manacles. Bending over me he turned the key in the old-fashioned handcuffs and tore them off. And like twin striking snakes my hands shot to his black throat, locked fiercely and dragged him down on top of me.