Like a madman, Manuel lashed at flanks of the roan team, beating them into a foaming lather of speed that carried the light buckboard into the air as it hurtled along the Maripo Road. Great clouds of dust formed in their wake, sucked into a swirling whirlpool behind them.
Josita shouted above the rush of air. “It is to the ranch of Don Miguel he has gone, Señor”
Manuel had heard of the place. It was said to be the largest breeding ground for fighting bulls in all of Spain. He had heard of Don Miguel and his cutthroat vaqueros, too, but somehow the thought of riding into danger no longer bothered him. Then, he had taken the precaution to bring a revolver. If it was necessary he would shoot them all down like the gypsy dogs they were.
Josita pointed to a ranch house in the distance.
“It is the one, Señor.”
Manuel snapped his whip over the steaming horses. The giant muscles of their sleek flanks rolled under their skin as they pounded on through the ranch gates. He drew them up before the low, rambling house, leaped to the ground. A greasy vaquero, lounging in the sun, came to attention. From inside the house, raucous laughter sounded. Manuel stepped to the porch, was about to mount the steps, when a tall, lumbering man emerged from the door. A bull whip dangled from a sash around his waist. On the other side was a bone-handled stiletto. His shaggy eyebrows twitched.
“What do you wish, Señor?”
Manual’s hand slid to the pocket where his revolver rested. “I seek a matador, Diego Martinez by name. He is here.”
“He is not here.”
The gun came to light in Manual’s hand. He advanced a step. “Do not move! Diego is here! Produce him!”
The other’s pig eyes gleamed. “I tell you, Señor, that Martinez is neither here nor has he been here.” He shrugged. “Of course, if you wish to make certain for yourself, I welcome you to my house. I am Don Miguel. I am entertaining a few buyers of bulls for the Plaza De Toros.” He bowed and indicated the door.
Manual advanced slowly, his forefinger taut on the gun trigger. “No trickery!” he warned. “Por Diablo, I will shoot!”
Don Miguel smiled smugly. “You think lightly of the hospitality of my house, Señor.”
Manuel entered the front room, swept it in a glance. There were men grouped about a table, drinking and laughing. He recognized none of them. Don Miguel was at his side.
“You see, Señor, you are wrong. Martinez has not been to my rancho for—”
A woman’s scream split the air. Manuel turned on his heels, faced the door. He saw his horses bolting and Josita being pulled from the carriage seat by two vaqueros. He raised his gun, shot through the open door. The bullet went wide, spattered into the road. The next moment he reeled as the bone handle of Don Miguel’s knife cracked on his head. There was a rush of pounding feet and a dozen men bore him down, pinning his arms behind his back. When he was securely held, Don Miguel motioned him to be raised up.
“You see, Señor,” he sneered in Manuel’s face, “to be suspicious is a dangerous thing. Now you will have audience with Diego but it may not be so pleasant.” Half-dragging, half-carrying, the vaqueros brought Manuel to the edge of a bull corral. Diego, a vicious smile playing over his scarred face, leaned against the boards. Two of his peones held Josita prisoner.
“So, my friend,” the matador said, “you thought it wise to follow Diego.” His hand shot out and crashed against Josita’s cheek. Manuel strained at his captors. “And all because of this Puta. Caramba! I will show you how we treat such a one. Then, you will be next because you dared strike the great Diego.” His sensual tongue came out and laved his lips. “The beautiful Señorita I will keep for myself.” He turned to the corral. “Huh! Huh!” he called, using the familiar cry of the vaqueros. From a covered pen at the far end of the enclosure, a giant black and white bull emerged. Slime glittered on his broad snout and his bloodshot eyes burned with fire. He pawed the soft ground, tossing his thick head up and down.
Manuel looked on in horror, as, at a word from the matador, the vaqueros who were holding Josita lifted her high into the air and dropped her struggling body into the corral. Screams of agony rent the air as the doomed girl saw the mad bull brace himself for the charge. She leaped to her feet, moved only a few steps. Then the half-ton of taut muscle hit her, curving horns driving into her back and lifting her off her feet like an empty sack. Insane at the smell of blood, the bull tossed Josita’s gored body off his horns, charged at it almost before it hit the ground and impaled it through the stomach. Manuel turned away but Diego caught his hair and jerked his head back. He closed his eyes to the sight of the dead girl, her bared breasts rising like sandy hills in a welter of blood. The bull, satisfied that its prey was without movement, nosed its muzzle in the tangle of flesh and intestines and walked away.
The matador laughed hollowly. “And you, my friend,” flipping his fingers across Manuel’s nose, “are next. But first I will show you how well the beautiful Señorita enjoys Diego.”
* * * *
Dragged back to the room where he had been overpowered, Manuel looked on as Diego came in with Alicia. Her beautiful face was pale and drawn, a portion of her dress torn away, baring the soft whiteness of her shoulder, a hint of her voluptuously firm breasts. The matador’s arm encircled her waist, the tips of his fingers creeping up to touch her breast. Fire raged in Manuel’s veins. If he could be free for but one fleeting moment—!
“Alicia,” he whispered softly.
She looked at him, her eyes seemingly far away, but Manuel caught a message of understanding…of sympathy. Diego drew her to him.
“It is Diego you adore, is it not, querida?”
She went limp against him, thigh to thigh. Diego laughed. “Take him to the bull!” he ordered, leading Alicia to the door. “Come, chiquita, we will see how brave the Castilian is, or possibly you do not care to?”
“Si,” she murmured. “I do.”
At the corral, Manuel fought with all the waning strength his body possessed, but it was to no avail. The strong arms of the vaqueros held him aloft and dropped him into the enclosure. The bull, aroused by motion, turned at the far end of the corral, spotted the sprawling figure of Manuel and moved forward slowly. Thirty paces away, he set himself for the charge. As he sprang, Alicia wrenched herself from Diego’s arms, ran to the iron gate and threw it open. Then, triumphantly, she tore her old rose dress from her body, waved it in the air. The bull, his attention caught by the fluttering red silk, changed his course and plunged for Alicia’s naked figure. She held her breath, waiting until he was close enough and the thunder of his hoofs was a roar in her ears. Out of the corral he came, head lowered, sharp horns projected. Alicia hurled the dress into the air, leaped aside. The beast shot by her, his glossy rump rubbing against her naked thigh.
In a moment, the ranch was a madhouse of screaming vaqueros, Manuel, dazed by the suddenness of it all, quickly recovered. He was at the gate, lifting Alicia from her feet, running with her to where the carriage and team stood. The bull, attracted to Diego and his men at the corral, lunged into their midst, his horns goring right and left. The matador escaped the first rush, but seeming to possess a sense that told him this man would eventually kill him in the ring, the bull charged Diego. Pinned against the corral fence, there was no escape. Diego shrieked and threw up his hands to ward off the attack. The shriek changed to a bloody gurgle as one horn punctured his stomach, coming out carmine-tipped at the small of his back.
Reaching the carriage, Manuel threw Alicia’s limp body across the seat, leaped up beside her and gripped the reins. The whip in his right hand hissed over the horses. He looked back as they plunged. All he could see was blood on the short grass, blood on ripped bodies, and blood on the face of Diego, stuck like a wax dummy on the bull’s horns.
He looked ahead, towards Madrid. The sky was burnt orange and yellow against a field of blue. There was no blood on the di
pping sun. It was clean and bright.
THE MOON GOD TAKES, by Robert Leslie Bellem
Originally published in Spicy Mystery Stories, December 1936.
John Salver watched her dancing in the moonlight; watched her dancing naked before the great grey stone.
And when he saw her face there came a cancer-gnawing fear; a suppurating terror seethed in John Salver’s heart. For the dancing woman’s face was a face long dead, and it struck like a poisoned dagger through his dark, lost soul.
Then, as he watched, he knew he had been wrong. It was not Helen Pemberton who danced in the moonlight, nude and lithe and eerie in the grey stone’s shadow. The lovely, lost Helen was long, long dead; and ghosts cannot dance by the shores of the sea. The moonlight had tricked him, Salver told himself. Moonlight, and conscience, and soul-consuming fear.
His fists were clenched as he watched; and his sweat was frigid though the night was warm. Grimly, he forced himself to calmness. His eyes were wide as the blonde girl danced…
High overhead rode the moon’s swollen whiteness, dappling the surf with a thousand silver coins. John Salver shivered in the pallid, silent night; but his eyes held a feral glow of new-born desire. Hungry he was for the lovely dancing-girl; and he watched her dancing before the great grey stone.
Strange, weird, unearthly was the girl’s dance. And unearthly was the perfection of her slender body, young and supple and firm. She flung out her arms to the great grey stone, bowed before its misshapen bulk, caressed it with the tips of her stroking fingers. And once she embraced it, pressed herself upon it, so that its rough surface bit into the mounds of her breasts. And her eyes were closed as she fused her flesh upon the grey stone’s hardness, and a wanton’s scarlet smile was on her red, red lips…
Again John Salver caught a glimpse of her face; and again he knew the bitter taste of terror in his heart. Helen Pemberton’s face…! The face of a woman dead these many, many years…!
Silently he crept closer, drawn by magnets more powerful than his will. And once more he realized that the moon’s white light had tricked him. Now that he was nearer, he knew he had been wrong. The lithe, dancing-girl resembled Helen Pemberton; but she was younger, more beautiful with a weird, transcendent sweetness. And besides, Helen Pemberton was long, long dead…
No; this dancing-girl was not Helen Pemberton. Nor was she wraith or spirit, for her body cast a shadow. And her lips were crimson poppies, smiling in the moon-glow. God, she was lovely, John Salver thought.
He eyed her hungrily, drinking in her contours, feasting on her sweet, soft curves. Her breasts were tiny hemispheres, taut and firm and milk-white; her hips were slender lyres as she danced…and danced…and danced…
The scene was like a dimly-remembered nightmare. There by the sea’s edge the sand was molten silver, velvet underfoot like finely-sifted dawn. It was strange, Salver told himself, that he had never seen the great grey stone before.
Where had it come from? Salver had lived in his cottage on the cliff for more than a year now; yet the great grey stone was new to him, as if it had been recently deposited by some giant hand. And who was the strange girl who danced before the stone, nude, young and lovely like a moon-priestess?
And why was her face like the face of the long-dead Helen?
Like the face of Helen Pemberton, yet more beautiful, more ethereal, more unearthly…
There was something fascinating, hypnotic, in the way she danced; in the way she bowed before the great grey stone. It was almost as if she were offering her body to the gross, inanimate, shapeless thing of grey; as if it were a dark god to whom she made oblation!
For a long while, Salver had been watching her. At midnight he had first come upon her, dancing under the moon; and now his wrist-watch told him that the hour was past one. And still the girl danced…
He could stand it no longer. He must know why she danced. He must know her name. He must know why she resembled a girl dead these five long years. And he must know whence came the great grey stone which had not stood at the sea’s edge the previous night!
Grimly, yet shaken with a fathomless dread, Salver stepped from his concealment.
She saw him. She saw him, and she turned away, as if she had not seen him. As if he had been a wraith, a non-existent shadow upon the sifted sand.
And by her very action, she struck terror into Salver’s heart.
He stared about him. In the moonlight, the sea and the shore and the cliffs beyond all seemed unreal, strange, new, different, somehow changed. Salver’s hair rose in inexplicable fear. What place was this? Had he been transported to some other world—a world queerly like his own, yet oddly different? Had he stepped across some forbidden threshold into another dimension—a dimension in which he himself had no substance, no solidity? Was he on a new plane, whose inhabitants could not see him?
He stared at the sand at his feet. And then a flooding relief came to him. He cast a shadow! Therefore he was real! He was a man—a man of flesh and blood and sinew and bone. A man whose soul cried out in hunger for the girl who danced before the great grey stone!
But why had she not seen him? Why had she seemed to look, not at him, but through him? Why when he had shown himself, had she deliberately turned away, ignoring his presence? Why? Why? Why?
Insistently the questions hammered within his brain. Where had the girl come from? Why was she nude? Why did she dance? How had the great grey stone been brought here? And why did the girl worship it, make obeisance to it, bruise her lovely breasts upon its grey, rough surface…?
John Salver stepped forward impatiently. “Girl!” he called out. “Girl!”
She paused in her dance. This time she looked at him. This time she seemed to see him.
“Girl!” he called again.
“Yes, Man?” she answered. And her voice was like the tinkling of mellow bells as silver as the moonlight and as golden as her lovely hair.
“Yes, Man?” she said again.
“Who are you, Girl?” he said in a strange, subdued voice. He took another step toward her.
“Who am I?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“Why—I don’t know. I’m just Me.”
“What is your name?” John Salver whispered. He was close to her now; so close that he could feel the warmth-aura of her slender body and smell the fragrance of her golden hair. So close that his chest ached with longing to seize her and hold her and kiss her crimson lips.
“My name?” she repeated. “I have no name. I dance in the moonlight. I belong to the Moon-God. Is that so strange?”
“It is very strange, Girl.”
“What is so strange about it, Man?”
“Everything!” he answered. Deep within him a fear was growing. This girl was mad! She was a mindless, empty shell of unutterable beauty! The thought was like a bitter lash across his soul, a stinging whip upon his heart. Because—he knew it abruptly and for no reason—he loved this wild, pagan creature of the moon-light and the night. He loved her; he wanted her. He must have her!
Yet…she was mad…!
But when he stared into her fathomless blue eyes he knew again that he was wrong, even as he had erred when at first he had thought her to be the long-dead Helen Pemberton. No; she was not mindless; was not mad. There was deep, ageless sanity in her gaze. Her eyes bespoke vast, unplumbed depths of knowledge. Salver got the uneasy impression that she knew all things of all men; that she even knew…his own dark secret.
But that could not be, he told himself. Nobody knew his secret, except himself. No one would ever know. There were times, lately, when even he himself almost forgot it…
Again he spoke to the golden-haired, slender girl. “Everything is strange!” he whispered.
“You mean because I have no name?”
“Yes.”
“Have you a name, Man?”
“Yes, I have a name. I am John Salver.”
“John Salver. Do you dance in the moonlight, John Salver?”
“No.”
“Then what do you do?”
“I am a sculptor.”
“What is a sculptor, John Salver?”
“A sculptor is a man who makes statues. A man who creates figures from marble, from stone.”
“Then I envy you, John Salver,” the girl said.
“You envy me?”
“Yes. Because if I could make statues, I would carve this great grey stone. I would fashion it in the shape of the Moon-God.”
Salver’s heart was beginning to race. “Perhaps I could teach you to become a sculptor.”
“No. I could not learn. I can only dance.”
“Do you always dance in the moonlight, Girl?”
“Yes, John Salver.”
“And you always dance nude?”
She frowned. “Nude. What does that mean, John Salver?”
“It means without clothing. As you are now.”
She ran her slender fingers over firm flesh, warm alluring curves. “Clothing? You mean things like those you have upon your own body? No, I never wear clothing. The Moon-God would not like it.”
“And you are not embarrassed to stand there before me and allow me to see you…nude?”
“No. Why should I be embarrassed? Am I ugly? Am I deformed? Does the sight of me make you feel any revulsion?”
“God, no!”
“Then why should I wear clothing?”
“You shouldn’t, ever!” he whispered. His hand went hesitantly toward her, and he touched her…almost fearful that he would feel nothingness instead of warm, satiny flesh.
Her skin was soft, smooth, to his fingers. And she did not draw back from his bold gesture. Instead, she smiled. “Nobody has ever touched me before, Man,” she told him.
“Nobody?”
“No. Nobody except the Moon-God. I let him touch me whenever he desires to.” And she ran toward the great grey stone, pressed her soft body against its rough unyielding bulk.
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