Thyra laughed insanely. “A bag of bones!” The blood dripped from her lip, where she had bitten through in the violence of her passion. “Run your krises over her shameless skin, slash her up and down and sideways, leaving marks that will heal to hideous scars. But do not kill her. Oh, no! do not kill her. I want her lover to see her hideous, deformed. Then he will realize what he has missed.”
With stealthy licking lips the Malays lifted their sinister wavy weapons. Bruce did not know it was he who yelled imprecations, commands, implorements, oaths, at the yellow gold woman, her Oriental minions. He strained every muscle to the bursting point; a red haze clouded his vision, but the shackles held.
The cruel kris flashed in air, descended. Julia, head still bowed, unmurmuring, awaited the first slicing slashes. Thyra watched, gloating, avid. Bruce locked eyes tight.
Hot words lanced his shrinking flesh, brought his eyes wide again, unbelieving.
“Drop them, you black sons of…”
The wavy-edged swords went down with a thud into the soft-piled rug. The Malays swerved, saw who it was that stood in the doorway, and swarthy skins went sallow with fright. They groveled on the floor, ejaculating streams of foreign syllables.
Thyra froze where she stood, shrank against the couch, stumbling.
“You!” she breathed.
Bruce cried out: “Jerry! Jerry Dunn! I thought you were hanging from the yardarm.”
The Maine woodsman, Federal Investigator, whatever he was, bent bitter black brows in a solid line. He scowled sardonically: “Not I, though no doubt pretty Thyra would have been willing.”
He advanced slowly into the room, eyes all on the voluptuous figure of the yellow-gold woman, gun snouting at the whole room. She fell on the couch, shrieking, bare arm upthrust to avoid a blow.
“Jerry!” she cried. “I didn’t do anything; I swear I…”
“Stop your damned lying mouth,” he said brutally. “I heard enough back in the lodge, and I heard enough outside the cabin before I came in. Your ratting days are over! Can’t keep your filthy paws off any man what comes along, can you? You ratted to Slim, trying to make him. You ratted to this guy, this Bar Harbor dude. You betrayed me with Ahmad and Muhammed—don’t tell me, I know. Yuh figured to get all the diamonds on board and beat it, leavin’ me on the beach to take the rap. But when yuh stole the boat, you didn’t know I had another one hid under the cliff a ways, did yuh? Me, what made a queen out of a village streetwalker!”
Thyra rose from her couch, faced him defiantly. Two red spots shone on her dead-white cheeks. Her eyes had a baleful, half-mad glare.
“Okay, Jerry, you called the turn.” She laughed shrilly. “You’re right; I never had any use for you, a cheapjack backwoodsman, a guide, a caretaker. Bah! You were only a tool—for everybody. For the syndicate in Amsterdam that hired you to run the smuggled stones from Sutter’s Point to their man in Portland. This ship was their idea, not yours. It picked up the stones from their yacht on the high seas. Its Diesel engines that made it sail as no schooner could, its dead black color, the touch of the drowned corpses for pilots, scared all the superstitious oafs out of the cove, and made it easy to run in the jewels.
“And whose idea was it to win over Ahmad and Muhammed and get away with the whole swag ourselves. Not yours! You didn’t have guts enough to think that up. Of course I was going to doublecross you. Why not? You tried to two-time me too, didn’t you? Grabbing that skinny girl on the beach. With the jewels in my hands, what did I need you for; a poor fool of a country yokel! Look!” She reached feverishly behind her, pulled out a casket, snapped open the lock in a single movement. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, millions in precious gems cascaded out.
* * * *
She was mad now. She plunged her hand in, sent the coruscating jewels tossing in the air, scattering in a shower of broken light. Her mouth was wide and her eyes glared. Her red lips foamed with mingled spume and blood. The robe had fallen to her waist. She looked like the goddess of madness.
Bruce forgot his situation in the sheer insanity of it all. Julia stood as one sculptured in marble. The Malays lifted their heads stealthily, awed, afraid. Dunn stared with the stare of a bird hypnotized by a snake. He did not seem to know he had a gun in his hands. He licked his lips with unconscious movements.
“Mine, all mine!” she screamed. “Not yours, dupe, yokel! You an emperor! Bah! Rather a chambermaid to pigs!” She swerved suddenly. “Ahmad, Muhammed! Kill! Kill!”
They had been waiting for that signal. They were on their feet as if steel springs had pushed them. Dunn started. The hypnotic sway of Thyra’s assumed madness vanished. His thick brows bent in savage snarl; he mouthed indistinguishable oaths. He raised his gun. Its muzzle roared flame and steel.
Thyra took a quick step forward and her eyes went wide. A round red hole appeared suddenly under her right breast. The red widened. She staggered and fell sprawling. Julia shrieked and fell fainting across a couch.
The Malays were already upon him, kris slashing downward. Dunn pivoted like lightning. His gun spat death for a second time. The bullet ploughed through Ahmad’s cheek. Face a gory mess, the Malay dropped like a stricken ox.
Dunn pivoted again. But fast as he was, Muhammed was faster. The kris, a wavy snake of steel, chopped down. Jerry screamed shrilly. His left hand fell with a hideous plop to the reddening carpet, and blood geysered from the severed wrist. The bullet smacked into a tapestry.
Muhammed raised the deadly kris for the finishing rip from chin to navel. Dunn gathered all his strength, heaved his gun across the Malay’s snarling countenance. The high-bridged nose caved in and smeared in sodden pulp. The kris whistled aimlessly into the carpet.
Animal sounds came from Muhammed through squashed lips. He leaped tigerishly upon his prey. Jerry, still clutching his gun in his good hand, went down, the Malay rolling over him like a cat. Over and over they went Blood spattered over couches, over walls, over Bruce himself. Whoever won would kill him, would do worse to Julia.
Jerry’s good hand rose suddenly, came down with a thud of steel upon the Malay’s smashed-in nose. An inhuman screech followed. Muhammed sagged. Dunn half-rose to his knees, and smashed blow on blow into the shapeless face. He had eyes only for his victim.
He did not see the slow, torturous, writhing progression of Thyra, her magnificent body half-nude, across the carpet. It was terrible, like the convulsive movements of a dying snake.
Bruce watched her progress, fascinated by her will power, shrinking from the hate in her pain-swept eyes. She was at his shackled feet, raising her head with infinite effort. Life was leaving her fast.
“You—” she mouthed with difficulty, “are good looking. Never mind—your Julia. Kill that—Jerry. He—killed me. Here!”
She fumbled with uncertain hand in a fold of her dress, brought out with stiffening fingers—a key. It fell with a plop to the rug; her eyes glazed, and she dropped back—dead!
Wild hope surged through Bruce, gave him superhuman strength. Dunn brought his gun down smashing for the last time. Muhammed quivered and lay still. Bruce jerked himself over, chair and all, squirmed his fingers toward the precious key. He caught it just as Jerry, aroused by the noise, was turning slowly.
Snarling, Jerry raised the gun. Bruce saw the slow movement, worked with frantic haste. The click of the key in the lock was heavenly music. One hand was free. He went for the other. Dunn, eyes aflame with the lust to kill, staggered to his knees, swayed, his gun describing an arc.
The other hand went free just as there was a crashing concussion of sound. Bruce’s shoulder rocked with a searing fire. Unmindful of the pain, he clawed desperately at the locks on his legs.
At last he was a free man. But the muzzle was this time unwavering, centered on his heart.
Bruce sprang, and Dunn, half-dead, pulled the trigger. As he did so, the smeared mass beneath him stirred suddenly; a corpse-like hand reached up, pushed. Jerry stumbled, fell back against the upright edge of the kris. His sh
riek lanced through the cabin, as his skull sliced in twain against the wavy steel. The bullet smashed into the snake-like god, brought him crashing. The Malay collapsed again.
Bruce ran for Julia and picked her up in his arms, stumbling over the gory dead out into the clean sweet air of the night. The mist had cleared, the moon was a kindly disk of silver, and death and madness and lustful cruelty seemed far away. Until his eye went up, toward the mast, toward the body that jittered in the gentle breeze. He recognized it now. Cuthbert Stapleton, Boston jeweler, and, unknown to Dunn, but not to Thyra, respectable fence for the smuggled fortunes in gems.
Bruce covered Julia’s semi-nudity with a strip of sail; he gently massaged her arms and cheeks. His thoughts were busy. That fabulous sum in jewels must be turned over to the Customs authorities. There was a substantial reward in the offing. Enough for marriage.
Julia opened her eyes, saw him bending over. Her arms went up, closed with shuddering embrace about his neck.
BLACK POOL FOR HELL MAIDENS, by Hal K. Wells
CHAPTER I
The Clawed Ghoul
The last rays of an unseen sun had faded until the wooded swamp was a fog-shrouded monochrome of somber shadows and swirling vapors. The dank chill of slime-wet air seeped coldly through the darkening gray mists. Larry Kent shivered and turned the collar of his coat higher around his neck.
Kent’s deeply tanned face was grimly intent as he tried vainly to peer ahead through the murky gloom. Hidden cells deep within his sensitive brain quivered to the stimulus of a familiar and eerie warning. Somewhere in that chill curtain of twilight fog, Fear lurked, naked and abysmal!
Larry Kent had spent too many years in the dark corners of the world to ever be mistaken in that weirdly menacing aura of incarnate terror. He had felt it in the cold stone cells of North China where shuddering coolies waited wretchedly for dawn and the headsman’s sword. He had sensed it in the sweating midnight of an African jungle kraal where close-packed blacks groveled in abject fear as Om-Jok, the Devil-God, stalked thundering through the night.
But never had Kent’s quivering nerves sensed the crepitant feel of Fear more strongly than they now did in the desolate heart of the Alabama swampland. It came pulsing through the shrouding vapor in unseen waves of almost tangible force. The central point from which the eerie emanations came was apparently somewhere just ahead. They subtly increased with every forward step that Kent took.
The oozing muck of the narrow path made tiny sucking noises beneath his feet. On either side, scum-filmed pools of stagnant water glowed dimly in the gray dusk. Leprous-white streamers of Spanish moss hung in spectral festoons from the gnarled limbs of trees that rose from the swampy mire.
Dread was a chill hard lump in the back of Kent’s brain. Was it into the forbidding depths of this almost trackless swamp that Dorothy Lane had so mysteriously vanished? Kent had succeeded in tracing her as far as the village of Sharby, some ten miles away. She had arrived there four days ago. Soon after she registered at the village hotel she had left with a man who was a stranger to the hotel proprietor. And from that point on, all trace had vanished of the girl who was Larry Kent’s fiancee.
Kent flinched as the bloated body of a swamp moccasin crossed the path ahead of him and slid sluggishly into a pool. Dorothy hated snakes, and all the other squirming horrors that swarm in the dark recesses of swampland. What possible reason could have brought her from her Chicago home to this area of stark desolation?
The brief note that Kent had found awaiting him upon his return from a business trip had told him nothing beyond the bare fact that she was leaving town for a short time. It was the intangible feeling of terror between the lines of the hastily scrawled words that had sent Kent in worried pursuit of the missing girl.
There was a faint rustling through the swamp as the ghostly white ribbons of moss stirred in the first sighing breath of the night breeze. Kent suddenly froze to a halt, his body tensely stiff.
Borne upon the dank wings of that breeze was a new and ghastly scent—the grim, pungent smell of Death!
Ahead of him a low strip of wooded land rose several feet above the swamp level. It was from there that the nauseous odor apparently came. Kent’s eyes hardened to the brilliance of blue ice. His step was the lithely silent tread of a stalking jaguar as he glided swiftly forward.
A muffled sound came faintly through the fog, a strange whimpering murmur that was certainly not human, yet was like no animal sound that Kent had ever heard. The smell of putrescence came to his nostrils in increasing waves of sickening horror. He drifted wraith-like through the tree trunks, then abruptly halted behind the sheltering bole of a big pine. There, barely ten feet from his staring eyes, was the spot from which the dread odor came.
Two dead bodies lay obscenely exposed amid scattered heaps of fresh earth. The water-saturated subsoil had made deep digging impossible, and the graves from which the corpses had been looted were little more than shallow trenches. Crouched gibbering over them was a creature that was a blasphemous caricature of a man.
It was naked except for a loincloth. Its hairless skull tapered grotesquely to a rounded point. Its eyes protruded so far from their shallow sockets that they almost seemed to be set upon movable stalks. The hand that grew from its right wrist was weirdly deformed. The fingers were fused into a single solid mass, while the thumb was massively overdeveloped, making the member look far more like the pincer-claw of a crayfish than a human hand.
A low whimpering monotone drooled from the creature’s gaping mouth as it stared with its bulging eyes down at the two exhumed bodies. The cadavers had obviously been buried for days. There was no grave-clothing to conceal the sloughing horror of their discolored flesh, already far gone in the ravages of decay. One had apparently been that of a man about fifty. The other was the powerfully built figure of a young man in his twenties. Both bodies were maimed. The older man’s legs were gone between the hips and the knees. The younger man’s right arm ended at the elbow.
Kent’s skin crawled in repugnance at the thought that the missing members had been devoured by the deformed ghoul that crouched above them. Then Kent saw that the amputations were old, with the stumps healed long before death.
If the creature had not already fed, however, there was little doubt that it intended to feed now, and quickly. Its claw-like right hand closed avidly upon the moldering flesh of the legless body. The pointed head dropped. A wordless babble of anticipation whimpered from the slavering lips.
Revulsion surged in a black flood through Kent’s brain. He stepped from behind the tree trunk with clenched fists.
“Get away from that!” he rasped through white lips.
The creature gaped up at him for a brief second with goggling eyes. Then as Kent advanced toward it, it abruptly scrambled erect upon thin bony legs and fled whimpering into the fog. As it ran, Kent saw for the first time a steel circlet and a short length of broken chain dangling from the creature’s ankle.
It did not run far. It had covered scarcely twenty feet before there was a crashing noise in the underbrush and three figures loomed dimly up through the fog in the creature’s path.
There was a short, violent struggle that ended with the ghoulish fugitive clamped firmly in the grip of a stocky, swarthy thug with the barrel-chested build of a gorilla. The swarthy fellow’s two companions paid slight attention to his brief struggle in subduing his squirming captive. Both were staring with narrowed eyes at Kent’s tall figure. One of the men flashed a hand to his hip, bringing it up again with the heavy bulk of an automatic pistol leveled at Kent.
“Don’t move, fellah!” he warned tersely. His eyes never left Kent as he jerked his head toward the swarthy-faced thug. “Take that fish-headed punk back to the house, Joe,” he ordered. “Chain him this time so he’ll stay! Doc and I’ll take care of this fellah.”
“Okay, Jeff,” the thickset one grunted. “Come on, you!” He jerked the wiggling figure of his grotesque captive around, and they vanished
into the fog. The other two men advanced toward Kent.
They were an oddly assorted pair. The one with the gun was tall, muscular, with brutish power etched in every line of his heavy-jawed face. His companion was small, wiry, with a thick shock of grayish hair. A dirty laboratory smock covered his slight figure. His gaunt, hawk-like face was nervously intense. The dilated pupils of his eyes glowed with feverish luster from far back in shadowed sockets.
They came to a halt a few steps from Kent. Their glance drifted momentarily to the exposed cadavers and looted graves beyond him, and their faces hardened in unmistakable menace.
“What are you doin’ here, fellah?” the brute-faced man with the pistol demanded truculently.
Kent’s temper flared at the arrogant insolence of the other’s tone, but he choked back any thought of a heated retort when he met the man’s eyes. They were the eyes of a born killer, cold, pale, utterly merciless. The lust for murder crouched like a black beast in their icily glittering depths, and it would take very little to unleash that beast.
“I left Sharby this morning for a hike,” Kent answered, his voice level. “I tried to take a short-cut through the swamp. I got lost, and I finally landed here.”
“That is too bad,” the gray-haired man in the smock said softly. His low-pitched voice trembled as though from excitement tightly held in check. “But you could hardly get back to Sharby tonight, even after we told you the way. The swamp is a nasty place to be wandering in after dark. You had better spend the night as our guest. Don’t you think that would be best, Jeffers?”
Jeffers’ thin lips smiled coldly. “Sure, he’d better flop with us tonight,” he agreed grimly. The muzzle of the pistol jerked in a brief gesture of command. “Get goin’, fellah! Show him the way, Doc.”
They started off into the fog-shrouded dusk in single file, with the gray-haired man in the lead, then Kent, and Jeffers bringing up the rear. They walked for a few minutes in taut silence. Then abruptly there was a hail from some unseen person in the gray murk ahead of them.
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