Reed’s skin began to twitch. The gloom was becoming a live and vibrant creature. He wondered who would carry his body down to the nethermost vault to place him with those others who had been blasted by Bint el Hareth’s wrath. How could a man’s body become like the shell of a sun-dried insect?
Let her appear. Let it be over with. She might smile before she blasted him. He rose, and taking his position at the circle, he began reciting the ritual.
Scarcely a dozen syllables had thundered from his dry lips when he felt eyes probing the darkness behind him. He whirled.
The red-haired girl was at the threshold. Her body was a vague white glamor, and her face was a heart-shaped blot.
“Get out!” barked Reed. “I’m trying to think! Don’t disturb me.”
Instead of retreating, she advanced. Reed’s hand flashed out to detain her. She eluded him and stepped toward the circle at the center.
That was the ultimate sacrilege!
But before his wrath could find voice, the red-haired girl spoke.
“Your fate is still in your hands, Morton Reed. Your choice is still yours.”
How could she have called him by name?
But that was swallowed by a greater wonder: she went on to speak of his search for Bint el Hareth!
“But how—how can you know—” he finally gasped.
“Because—” She paused. He could just distinguish the whiteness of her hands against the waist band of what remained of her skirt. It slipped down in a heap about her ankles. “Because I am Bint el Hareth.”
Her words burned into his brain as his eyes saw what gleamed at her waist: a broad silver girdle, flashing with uncounted sapphires. This was some monstrous trickery! Down there in the court, by the dying embers of their fire—
“How—”
“Raise your eyes, Morton Reed,” she softly murmured, “I have other features as well…”
* * * *
Her voice had in some inexpressible way changed. It was low and vibrant and heart-stirring and strangely modulated. Despite the alluring vagueness of her body, he was certain that its contours had unaccountably altered. Some strange change was going on before his very eyes. And as Reed looked her in the face, he could no longer be sure that her hair was red, or that it was not the deceptive play of brightening starlight that seemed to make her cheekbones ever so slightly more prominent and give her features a faintly aquiline cast.
“I am indeed Bint el Hareth,” she continued. “It was written on the books of fate that that red-haired girl be killed in the raid. What difference if I borrowed her body, or shaped one for myself of moon glamor and star dust? I have already reshaped her to the form you desired.”
“Then—down there—in the court—”
Bint el Hareth smiled.
“That was still her body, and some of her lingering personality.”
“Then you’re not jealous?”
She shook her head. “Old Habeeb gave you a garbled tradition. Not my wrath, but my more than human kisses left my lovers as you saw them. They accepted their doom and were glad.
“The choice is yours, Morton Reed. Those bandits down there cannot touch what little is now left of that red-haired girl’s flesh.
“Deny and disown me, open the gateway, and go in peace. Your life will be long—but you will never forget the silver girdle that you could not remove.”
She paused and ran slender fingers through her hair and withdrew a small key.
“And this,” she continued, handing it to Reed, “is the key of doom. If you still have the courage and the will.”
The night had become a maze of wonders. Reed saw that Bint el Hareth had blossomed in the light of stars risen to their culmination. Then for a moment he pictured those desiccated bodies ranged in the crypts below.
“It would be worse to wander with only the memories of a girdle without a key,” he finally said.
Key in hand he stepped into the circle; and the splendor of her eyes foreshadowed the consuming fire of her uncounted strange kisses…
* * * *
And all the while, the leader of the Kurdish bandits watched his men heaping wood in front of the iron grille.
“That should be enough,” he at last decided. It had taken a long time to find enough fuel in that barren waste. It took almost as long again before the massive bars reached a red heat. Then sword-strokes bit into the glowing metal, and the bandits poured through the breach.
Sunlight was filtering through the slitted dome of the upper chamber when they reached its threshold.
“Wallah,” muttered the bandits, “where is that red-haired feringhi wench? Not even a cat could have leaped through those small slits.”
Then they saw Reed lying in an alcove between a pair of winged bulls. They recoiled, then paused to wonder what dream could leave such ecstasy on any man’s face.
“The saint is sleeping,” whispered the leader. “But see the print of her lips on his forehead. Doubtless—though Allah is the knower—he utterly destroyed her for trying to seduce him.”
“Ay wallah,” echoed another in an awed whisper, “let us leave, before this pious man likewise destroys us for disturbing his sleep.”
PIT OF MADNESS
Bayonne seemed incredibly ancient and lovely to Denis Crane as he headed from the wine shop to the Biarritz Highway and across the sombre parkway toward the Gate of Spain. The cathedral spires were silver lance-heads reaching into the moonglow, and the city was a pearl gray enchantment afloat on a sea of writhing river mists: yet that blood soaked soil whispered to Denis Crane as he walked.
This was unholy ground, honeycombed with crypts in which Roman legionnaires had worshiped Mithra, and watched frenzied devotees slash and mutilate and emasculate themselves in honor of bloodthirsty Cybele. This corner of France was the home of witch and wizard and warlock.
A shiver rippled down Crane’s lean, broad-shouldered body as he glanced to his left and saw the ominous cluster of ancient trees that overshadowed the low gray cupola of the spring where Satan and Saint Leon once had met—
Another medieval legend. Well, and here is the causeway, and just ahead, rue d’Espagne, with the yellow glow from the windows of Basque wine shops breaking its narrow gloom.
But the scream that came from his left told him how far from warm humanity he was, however near the lights might be. It was the sobbing, desperate outcry of some woman whose last gasp could not quite voice her terror.
Crane’s suntan became a sickly yellow in that spectral, mist-filtered moonlight. He wheeled, stared into the swirling grayness of the dry moat that girdled the thirty-foot city wall. His face lengthened, tightened into grim angles, and his eyes narrowed as he listened. Silence—sinister…poisonous.… Then that dreadful wail again. It was closer now, and though it was inarticulate he knew that the woman was crying for help and despaired of getting it.
An everlasting instant, and she burst from the mist and into the foreground at the foot of the causeway that blocked the moat. Her abrupt appearance shocked Crane, though he knew that it was but the illusion of fog and moonlight.
Her hair was a streaming blackness, and her body a pearl-white glow. Her feet and legs were as bare as her torso. All she wore was a flimsy shawl caught at the shoulder, draping slantwise to veil one breast, and flaring out, to shroud the opposite hip. Crane distinguished no feature but her mouth. It was distorted in a cry she could not utter.
He plunged down the steep slope of the causeway and into the moat. Her legs gave way, pitching her headlong to the sand. She lay there, arms sprawled out. As he reached her side, she shuddered and slumped flat, no longer making instinctive efforts to protect herself.
Crane rolled her over into the crook of his arm. He saw then what mist and motion had masked: her throat was savagely torn, her breas
t and stomach clawed and lacerated. Her face was a gory crisscross of bruises and slashes. The filmy fragility of the shoulder-to-hip shawl had not hampered her assailant enough for him to tear it from her body.
Neither pulse nor breath was perceptible. Though her sweetly curved body was blood-splashed, her wounds could not have killed her; but terror and despair could have.
Her face must have been as lovely as her body; but horror blinded him to the sleekness of her hips and the shapeliness of her legs and firm young breasts. His eyes narrowed as he recovered sufficiently from the shock to interpret certain significant signs.
Her hands had the incredible softness of one utterly a stranger to the lightest work; but what she still clenched in her fingers was a startling revelation.
It was similar in shape to a military campaign badge; purple, with a rosette of the same color. A decoration awarded to an elect few.
But most revealing of all was the silken shawl. It placed her beyond any question. There was only one house in Bayonne where the girls paraded in such costume; and that place was on the street that ran along the city wall.
Then he noted that she was breathing; and a slash on her inside arm was bleeding. It might not be dangerous, but it was near an artery. He drew a clean handkerchief from his breast pocket, and devised a tourniquet.
The town was asleep, and he’d have to carry her to the house on the wall; but first give that tourniquet a twist. He fumbled for a pencil—
But Crane’s first aid was not completed.
The sand of the moat bottom gave no betraying crunch; the mist thinned moonlight cast no warning shadow; and Crane’s intuition was an instant too late. He dropped the battered girl, but before he caught more than a fleeting glimpse of the dark figure which loomed monstrously above him in the grayness, a flying tackle carried him crashing to the ground.
The impact knocked him breathless. Iron hands clutched his throat; but Crane’s fist hammered home. Splintered teeth lacerated his knuckles, and blood gushed, drenching his face. His opponent, snarling scarcely articulate curses, jerked back. Crane’s boot lashed out.
But the moonlight was blocked by another figure with monstrous, outspread wings. Bat wings, it seemed. It dropped, boring headlong, toppling Crane backward. A spicy, pungent odor, an odd blend of incense and cosmetics stung his nostrils. Then, still grappling with the thing which had swooped out of the upper mist, he crashed against the gray masonry of the bastioned wall. Crane’s hard head had not a chance against a fortress built to defy a battering ram, but his shoulders absorbed enough of the terrific impact to save his skull Some lingering vestige of wits told him that once out of action, he no longer interested the enemy.
Minutes elapsed before he could fight off the numbness and inertia that clogged his will. But he finally rolled over and clambered to his knees.
He was alone in that gray, ghoulish moonglow. The girl was gone. He saw the prints of his own feet and those of the mysterious assailants that had swooped down on him. Blood flecked the sand, and one untrampled spot still held the imprint of that savagely slashed girl’s breasts. It had not been illusion; but for a moment Crane’s blood became ice.
The laundry marks and monogram on the handkerchief he had bound to the girl’s arm would damn him beyond redemption when her body was found. And aside from that, he could not hope to obliterate the traces of the struggle in the moat.
The French police, inhumanly efficient, would inevitably connect him with the outrage. When he returned to his quarters, the concierge would note the time of his arrival. The proprietor of the wine shop on the Biarritz Road would remember when he had left, and the direction he had taken. And every foreigner is conspicuous in sleepy Bayonne.
Damn those experts with their omniscient microscopes! Their chemical tests which would detect the faintest trace of blood on his clothing.
And someone, watching from some darkened window of a house on the wall, might observe him as he left the moat, might already have heard and noted the encounter.
Only one move for Crane: find that girl, dead or alive. Hit first before the merciless Sûreté Générate connected him with the work of night-roving ghouls. And find the man whose decoration she had clutched.
As he hastened down the moat, he followed the girl’s small, shapely footprints along the sand. Wrath burned him as his first fear left. Though that gaudy shawl branded her, she was still a woman, and the victim of something monstrous and deadly; something too eager for her torn flesh to bother with Crane beyond hammering him out of action.
Or had the two spectral assailants already arranged to frame him?
Half way to the sombre Lachepaillet Gate he noted the spot where her bare feet first marked the moat-bottom sand. He entered the walled city and hastened to his room at the Panier-Fleuri. The concièrge regarded him with bleary eyes that suddenly sharpened. But she said nothing.
Once in his room, he cleaned up, then stretched long legs toward rue Lachepaillet. He should report to the police; but who would believe such a story, told by an insane American, trying to implicate one who wore that coveted purple decoration the size of an A.E.F. campaign badge?
Crane jabbed a pushbutton. A trim, sharp-eyed girl in black admitted him and led the way to a spacious hall whose walls and ceiling were a solid expanse of mirror.
A bell tinkled, and a half a dozen girls lounging on upholstered benches lined up on parade as several others emerged from a rear apartment to join them.
They wore satin slippers and knee length silk hosiery. Their professional smiles, and the flimsy chiffon shawls draped from right breast to left hip completed their costume. Not a bad array; though some had over-plump legs, and breasts that would have been the better for a brassiere. A few were lovely in face and body, but there was something infinitely repulsive about that grotesque multiplication of bare flesh in those mirrored panels whose angles probed the concealment of chiffon shawls and made the glaring room a patchwork of feminine curves.
Crane caught a freshly mirrored whiteness and turned toward the door. The shock for an instant numbed him. A full moment elapsed before he realized that he was not looking at the girl who had vanished from the moat.
She had the same gracious inward dip at the waist, the same heart-warming flare of the hips, and one lovely breast peeped alluringly through the heavy strands of hair that trailed down over her left shoulder. Her blue eyes were almost black. Their troubled darkness matched the sombre droop of her lips.
Tears had smudged the mascara of her lashes and a trace of redness lingered. Crane perceived the tensity of her body and saw her fingers twisting the trailing fringe of her shawl.
Why had she been reserved from the lineup? Why that startling resemblance to that savagely mutilated girl in the moat? Why that black fear in her eyes?
The girl’s fingers sank insistently into his wrist, and he felt the firm pressure of her hip and shoulder against him as she paused in the doorway.
More than her resemblance to the girl in the moat told Crane that this was the one who could give him the most help—or damn him soonest. He followed his hunch.
“Allons!” he whispered. “Let’s go.”
He tossed the three hundred pound keeper of the house a purple Banque de France note, and followed the girl in the scarlet shawl up a flight of stairs and into a sombrely furnished room.
Her name was Madeline, but all the coquetry of the game was missing, though she contrived a friendly smile as her fingers plucked the shoulder knot of her shawl.
Crane checked her.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded.
“Diane—my sister,” she answered. “I’m terribly worried. She hasn’t come back. That awful Arab—or Turk—”
Crane frowned. That was an odd touch. Who ever heard of an Algerian wearing that decoration?
As she spoke, s
he abstractedly kicked off her slippers and leaned back among the cushions. She regarded Crane curiously, seeing that his face was gray and grim.
“What’s the matter…don’t you like me?”
“That will keep!” His voice was harsh and low. “Tell me about that Arab. What was wrong with him?”
“Some of the things he did, the first night he was here. Before he took Diane—wherever he’s taken her. It was in the room next door, No, he didn’t hurt her at all—I mean the other girl, not Diane. But he frightened her terribly. I saw him leave. His pupils were like black saucers. Mon Dieu! Such eyes. Like Satan eating opium.”
She was wrong. Opium contracted the pupils, but her very intensity gave Crane the picture.
“Are you sure he didn’t wear the Order of Saint Léon?”
“Mumm…no, of course not! But he dropped something in her room, and she showed it to me, and left it here.” Madeline slid to her feet and stepped to the dresser. She returned with a small silver watch charm. It was a tiny peacock with ruby eyes; an exquisitely tooled bit of metal.
“A soldier who’d served in Syria once told me,” explained Madeline, “that that is a symbol of the devil-worshipers. That’s what’s been worrying me. If I’d known in time, I’d never have let her go. But why should you care?”
“I’m a damn’ fool who can’t mind his business,” Crane smiled grimly. “I’ve got to find your sister.” She sceptically eyed him.
“Then you don’t want me? But you paid—”
Crane shrugged. “If you knew, you’d understand.”
“Oh…” Very slowly, like a dying echo. She caught him by the shoulders, stared him full in the face; and bit by bit she read that the sombre riddle in his gray eyes concerned her missing sister.
“I didn’t realize you knew Diane…” Her arm slipped about his neck and she drew closer as she continued, “I’ll go with you. I’ll help.”
The E. Hoffmann Price Spice Adventure MEGAPACK ™ Page 4