Skull Face Revealed

by Roberta E. Howard

  * * *

  Ancient Horror

  'Here now in her triumph where all things falter,

  Stretched out on the spoils that her own hand spread,

  As a God self-slain on her own strange altar,

  Death lies dead.'

  - Swinburne

  Slowly I drifted back into life--slowly, slowly. A mist held me and in the mist I saw a Skull--

  I lay in a steel cage like a captive wolf, and the bars were too strong, I saw, even for my strength. The cage seemed to be set in a sort of niche in the wall and I was looking into a large room. This room was under the earth, for the floor was of stone flags and the walls and ceiling were composed of gigantic block of the same material. Shelves ranged the walls, covered with weird appliances, apparently of a scientific nature, and more were on the great table that stood in the center of the room. Beside this sat Kathulis.

  The sorceress was clad in a snaky yellow robe, and those hideous hands and that terrible head were more pronouncedly reptilian than ever. She turned her great yellow eyes toward me, like pools of livid fire, and her parchment-thin lips moved in what probably passed for a smile.

  I staggered erect and gripped the bars, cursing.

  'Gordon, curse you, where is Gordon?'

  Kathulis took a test-tube from the table, eyed it closely and emptied it into another.

  'Ah, my friend awakes,' she murmured in her voice--the voice of a living dead woman.

  She thrust her hands into her long sleeves and turned fully to me.

  'I think in you,' she said distinctly, 'I have created a Frankenstein monster. I made of you a superhuman creature to serve my wishes and you broke from me. You are the bane of my might, worse than Gordon even. You have killed valuable servants and interfered with my plans. However, your evil comes to an end tonight. Your friend Gordon broke away but she is being hunted through the tunnels and cannot escape.

  'You,' she continued with the sincere interest of the scientist, 'are a most interesting subject. Your brain must be formed differently from any other woman that ever lived. I will make a close study of it and add it to my laboratory. How a woman, with the apparent need of the elixir in her system, has managed to go on for two days still stimulated by the last draft is more than I can understand.'

  My heart leaped. With all her wisdom, little Zuleik had tricked her and she evidently did not know that he had filched a flask of the life-giving stuff from her.

  'The last draft you had from me,' she went on, 'was sufficient only for some eight hours. I repeat, it has me puzzled. Can you offer any suggestion?'

  I snarled wordlessly. She sighed.

  'As always the barbarian. Truly the proverb speaks: 'Jest with the wounded tiger and warm the adder in your chest before you seek to lift the savage from her savagery.' '

  She meditated awhile in silence. I watched her uneasily. There was about her a vague and curious difference--his long fingers emerging from the sleeves drummed on the chair arms and some hidden exultation strummed at the back of her voice, lending it unaccustomed vibrancy.

  'And you might have been a queen of the new regime,' she said suddenly. 'Aye, the new--new and inhumanly old!'

  I shuddered as her dry cackling laugh rasped out.

  She bent her head as if listening. From far off seemed to come a hum of guttural voices. Her lips writhed in a smile.

  'My black children,' she murmured. 'They tear my enemy Gordon to pieces in the tunnels. They, Ms. Costigyn, are my real henchwomen and it was for their edification tonight that I laid Joan Gordon on the sacrificial stone. I would have preferred to have made some experiments with her, based on certain scientific theories, but my children must be humored. Later under my tutelage they will outgrow their childish superstitions and throw aside their foolish customs, but now they must be led gently by the hand.

  'How do you like these under-the-earth corridors, Ms. Costigyn?' she switched suddenly. 'You thought of them--what? No doubt that the white savages of your Middle Ages built them? Faugh! These tunnels are older than your world! They were brought into being by mighty queens, too many eons ago for your mind to grasp, when an imperial city towered where this crude village of London stands. All trace of that metropolis has crumbled to dust and vanished, but these corridors were built by more than human skill--ha ha! Of all the teeming thousands who move daily above them, none knows of their existence save my servants--and not all of them. Zuleik, for instance, does not know of them, for of late I have begun to doubt his loyalty and shall doubtless soon make of his an example.'

  At that I hurled myself blindly against the side of the cage, a red wave of hate and fury tossing me in its grip. I seized the bars and strained until the veins stood out on my forehead and the muscles bulged and crackled in my arms and shoulders. And the bars bent before my onslaught--a little but no more, and finally the power flowed from my limbs and I sank down trembling and weakened. Kathulis watched me imperturbably.

  'The bars hold,' be announced with something almost like relief in her tone. 'Frankly, I prefer to be on the opposite side of them. You are a human ape if there was ever one.'

  She laughed suddenly and wildly.

  'But why do you seek to oppose me?' she shrieked unexpectedly. 'Why defy me, who am Kathulis, the Sorceress, great even in the days of the old empire? Today, invincible! A magician, a scientist, among ignorant savages! Ha ha!'

  I shuddered, and sudden blinding light broke in on me. Kathulis herself was an addict, and was fired by the stuff of her choice! What hellish concoction was strong enough, terrible enough to thrill the Mistress and inflame her, I do not know, nor do I wish to know. Of all the uncanny knowledge that was hers, I, knowing the woman as I did, count this the most weird and grisly.

  'You, you paltry fool!' she was ranting, her face lit supernaturally.

  'Know you who I am? Kathulis of Egypt! Bah! They knew me in the old days! I reigned in the dim misty sea lands ages and ages before the sea rose and engulfed the land. I died, not as women die; the magic draft of life everlasting was ours! I drank deep and slept. Long I slept in my lacquered case! My flesh withered and grew hard; my blood dried in my veins. I became as one dead. But still within me burned the spirit of life, sleeping but anticipating the awakening. The great cities crumbled to dust. The sea drank the land. The tall shrines and the lofty spires sank beneath the green waves. All this I knew as I slept, as a woman knows in dreams. Kathulis of Egypt? Faugh! Kathulis of Atlantis!'

  I uttered a sudden involuntary cry. This was too grisly for sanity.

  'Aye, the magician, the sorceress.

  'And down the long years of savagery, through which the barbaric races struggled to rise without their mistresses, the legend came of the day of empire, when one of the Old Race would rise up from the sea. Aye, and lead to victory the black people who were our slaves in the old days.

  'These brown and yellow people, what care I for them? The blacks were the slaves of my race, and I am their god today. They will obey me. The yellow and the brown peoples are fools--I make them my tools and the day will come when my black warriors will turn on them and slay at my word. And you, you white barbarians, whose ape-ancestors forever defied my race and me, your doom is at hand! And when I mount my universal throne, the only whites shall be white slaves!

  'The day came as prophesied, when my case, breaking free from the halls where it lay--where it had lain when Atlantis was still sovereign of the world--where since his empery it had sunk into the green fathoms--when my case, I say, was smitten by the deep sea tides and moved and stirred, and thrust aside the clinging seaweed that masks temples and minarets, and came floating up past the lofty sapphire and golden spires, up through the green waters, to float upon the lazy waves of the sea.

  'Then came a white fool carrying out the destiny of which she was not aware. The women on her ship, true believers, knew that the time had come. And I--the air entered my nostrils and I awoke from the long, long sleep. I stirred and moved and lived. And ris
ing in the night, I slew the fool that had lifted me from the ocean, and my servants made obeisance to me and took me into Africa, where I abode awhile and learned new languages and new ways of a new world and became strong.

  'The wisdom of your dreary world--ha ha! I who delved deeper in the mysteries of the old than any woman dared go! All that women know today, I know, and the knowledge beside that which I have brought down the centuries is as a grain of sand beside a mountain! You should know something of that knowledge! By it I lifted you from one hell to plunge you into a greater! You fool, here at my hand is that which would lift you from this! Aye, would strike from you the chains whereby I have bound you!'

  She snatched up a golden vial and shook it before my gaze. I eyed it as women dying in the desert must eye the distant mirages. Kathulis fingered it meditatively. Her unnatural excitement seemed to have passed suddenly, and when she spoke again it was in the passionless, measured tones of the scientist.

  'That would indeed be an experiment worthwhile--to free you of the elixir habit and see if your dope-riddled body would sustain life. Nine times out of ten the victim, with the need and stimulus removed, would die--but you are such a giant of a brute--'

  She sighed and set the vial down.

  'The dreamer opposes the woman of destiny. My time is not my own or I should choose to spend my life pent in my laboratories, carrying out my experiments. But now, as in the days of the old empire when queens sought my counsel, I must work and labor for the good of the race at large. Aye, I must toil and sow the seed of glory against the full coming of the imperial days when the seas give up all their living dead.'

  I shuddered. Kathulis laughed wildly again. Her fingers began to drum her chair arms and her face gleamed with the unnatural light once more. The red visions had begun to seethe in her skull again.

  'Under the green seas they lie, the ancient mistresses, in their lacquered cases, dead as women reckon death, but only sleeping. Sleeping through the long ages as hours, awaiting the day of awakening! The old mistresses, the wise women, who foresaw the day when the sea would gulp the land, and who made ready. Made ready that they might rise again in the barbaric days to come. As did I. Sleeping they lie, ancient queens and grim wizards, who died as women die, before Atlantis sank. Who, sleeping, sank with his but who shall arise again!

  'Mine the glory! I rose first. And I sought out the site of old cities, on shores that did not sink. Vanished, long vanished. The barbarian tide swept over them thousands of years ago as the green waters swept over their elder brother of the deeps. On some, the deserts stretch bare. Over some, as here, young barbarian cities rise.'

  She halted suddenly. Her eyes sought one of the dark openings that marked a corridor. I think her strange intuition warned her of some impending danger but I do not believe that she had any inkling of how dramatically our scene would be interrupted.

  As she looked, swift footsteps sounded and a woman appeared suddenly in the doorway--a woman disheveled, tattered and bloody. Joan Gordon! Kathulis sprang erect with a cry, and Gordon, gasping as from superhuman exertion, brought down the revolver she held in her hand and fired point-blank. Kathulis staggered, clapping her hand to her breast, and then, groping wildly, reeled to the wall and fell against it. A doorway opened and she reeled through, but as Gordon leaped fiercely across the chamber, a blank stone surface met her gaze, which yielded not to her savage hammerings.

  She whirled and ran drunkenly to the table where lay a bunch of keys the Mistress had dropped there.

  'The vial!' I shrieked. 'Take the vial!' And she thrust it into her pocket.

  Back along the corridor through which she had come sounded a faint clamor growing swiftly like a wolf-pack in full cry. A few precious seconds spent with fumbling for the right key, then the cage door swung open and I sprang out. A sight for the gods we were, the two of us! Slashed, bruised and cut, our garments hanging in tatters--my wounds had ceased to bleed, but now as I moved they began again, and from the stiffness of my hands I knew that my knuckles were shattered. As for Gordon, she was fairly drenched in blood from crown to foot.

  We made off down a passage in the opposite direction from the menacing noise, which I knew to be the black servants of the Mistress in full pursuit of us. Neither of us was in good shape for running, but we did our best. Where we were going I had no idea. My superhuman strength had deserted me and I was going now on willpower alone. We switched off into another corridor and we had not gone twenty steps until, looking back, I saw the first of the black devils round the corner.

  A desperate effort increased our lead a trifle. But they had seen us, were in full view now, and a yell of fury broke from them to be succeeded by a more sinister silence as they bent all efforts to overhauling us.

  There a short distance in front of us we saw a stair loom suddenly in the gloom. If we might reach that--but we saw something else.

  Against the ceiling, between us and the stairs, hung a huge thing like an iron grille, with great spikes along the bottom--a portcullis. And even as we looked, without halting in our panting strides, it began to move.

  'They're lowering the portcullis!' Gordon croaked, her blood-streaked face a mask of exhaustion and will.

  Now the blacks were only ten feet behind us--now the huge grate, gaining momentum, with a creak of rusty, unused mechanism, rushed downward. A final spurt, a gasping straining nightstallion of effort--and Gordon, sweeping us both along in a wild burst of pure nerve-strength, hurled us under and through, and the grate crashed behind us!

  A moment we lay gasping, not heeding the frenzied horde who raved and screamed on the other side of the grate. So close had that final leap been, that the great spikes in their descent had torn shreds from our clothing.

  The blacks were thrusting at us with daggers through the bars, but we were out of reach and it seemed to me that I was content to lie there and die of exhaustion. But Gordon weaved unsteadily erect and hauled me with her.

  'Got to get out,' she croaked; 'go to warn--Scotland Yard--honeycombs in heart of London--high explosives--arms--ammunition.'

  We blundered up the steps, and in front of us I seemed to hear a sound of metal grating against metal. The stairs ended abruptly, on a landing that terminated in a blank wall. Gordon hammered against this and the inevitable secret doorway opened. Light streamed in, through the bars of a sort of grille. Women in the uniform of London police were sawing at these with hacksaws, and even as they greeted us, an opening was made through which we crawled.

  'You're hurt, sir!' One of the women took Gordon's arm.

  My companion shook her off.

  'There's no time to lose! Out of here, as quick as we can go!'

  I saw that we were in a basement of some sort. We hastened up the steps and out into the early dawn which was turning the east scarlet. Over the tops of smaller houses I saw in the distance a great gaunt building on the roof of which, I felt instinctively, that wild drama had been enacted the night before.

  'That building was leased some months ago by a mysterious Chinese,' said Gordon, following my gaze. 'Office building originally--the neighborhood deteriorated and the building stood vacant for some time. The new tenant added several stories to it but left it apparently empty. Had my eye on it for some time.'

  This was told in Gordon's jerky swift manner as we started hurriedly along the sidewalk. I listened mechanically, like a woman in a trance. My vitality was ebbing fast and I knew that I was going to crumple at any moment.

  'The people living in the vicinity had been reporting strange sights and noises. The woman who owned the basement we just left heard queer sounds emanating from the wall of the basement and called the police. About that time I was racing back and forth among those cursed corridors like a hunted rat and I heard the police banging on the wall. I found the secret door and opened it but found it barred by a grating. It was while I was telling the astounded policemen to procure a hacksaw that the pursuing Blacks, whom I had eluded for the moment, came into sigh
t and I was forced to shut the door and run for it again. By pure luck I found you and by pure luck managed to find the way back to the door.

  'Now we must get to Scotland Yard. If we strike swiftly, we may capture the entire band of devils. Whether I killed Kathulis or not I do not know, or if she can be killed by mortal weapons. But to the best of my knowledge all of them are now in those subterranean corridors and--'

  At that moment the world shook! A brain-shattering roar seemed to break the sky with its incredible detonation; houses tottered and crashed to ruins; a mighty pillar of smoke and flame burst from the earth and on its wings great masses of debris soared skyward. A black fog of smoke and dust and falling timbers enveloped the world, a prolonged thunder seemed to rumble up from the center of the earth as of walls and ceilings falling, and amid the uproar and the screaming I sank down and knew no more.