by Cave, Hugh
"Will I lock it, sir?"
"Yes. And keep the key in your hand. We may need it quickly."
Jeremy glanced at him quizzically. Then, with a shrug, he turned the ignition key, removed it, and slid out of his seat. In a moment Paul was beside him, gripping his arm.
"Sure you want to come, Jeremy?"
"Why not, sir? I'm pretty handy with my fists, ain't I?"
"That won't help, Jeremy. Nothing will help, if we're seen."
"Well then, we won't be seen. You're shiverin', sir!"
"Am I?" Paul's laugh was harsh, toneless. "That's bad. I shouldn't be. Not after what happened before. Shivering won't help, either. Come on."
They passed down the narrow road, leaving the roadster half hidden, black and silent, behind them. Paul, thinking again, peered furtively on either side, fighting back his fear of the darkness. Shadows leaped at him from matted walls of gloom. Faint whispers sucked down from above as the night breeze whimpered and muttered through rustling leaves. The horrors of the madhouse came back, vivid and close. Supernatural voices laughed hideously and screamed, and everywhere ahead, in the gloom, a limping shape seemed to be waiting and leering and pointing triumphantly.
Jeremy, more or less indifferent to intangible terror, plodded along with a set frown on his square features. Shadows and whispers did not trouble him. He did not know. And Paul, pressing close to him, found relief in the man's presence, and courage in his stolidness.
So they walked on and on, until presently out of the darkness ahead of them, on the right, a gray mass took form with maddening slowness. Paul stood quite still, drawing his companion close.
"That's the place," he said almost inaudibly.
"There's a light, sir," Jeremy observed.
Yes, there was a light. But it was a feeble thing, a mere oblong slit of illumination, visible faintly through a cracked shutter. And the house itself, upstairs and down, was sinister with darkness. Like an enormous humpbacked toad it squatted just off the road, isolated in its own desolate clearing, hemmed in on three sides by unbroken walls of gloom and silence.
Not a lovely place, the Gray Toad Inn. Not any more. At one time, Paul reflected, it had been a roadhouse of gay repute, situated pleasantly on an out-of-the-way road between semi-dead villages, with desirable seclusion a strong point in its favor. Here, night after night, had come revelers from the nearby city and even nearer towns, to laugh and drink and fill the big house with youthful clamor.
But not anymore. All that had changed. The inn had grown cold and lonely. The road itself had fallen more and more into disuse and obscurity. That very isolation which had made the place a popular resort had now buried it in abject solitude and left it dark and dismal, hoary with interred memories, sinking into slow rot.
Yet a light glowed now in the lower level, winking out into the darkness. A wan yellow light, filtered through a cracked blind, clutching outward like a thin bony finger, as if pleading for old times to return. And Paul and Jeremy, staring at it, crept slowly, noiselessly, through the deep grass of the overgrown clearing toward it.
And there was something else, which the inn had never known in its days of laughter and gaiety—something which even Jeremy, who lacked imagination and feared no foe but of flesh and form, noticed furtively.
"There's somethin'," he whispered, reaching out to grasp Paul's coat, "there's somethin' awful queer here, sir. The air. . .
Paul stiffened. Fifty yards before him, the humpbacked structure bulged sullenly against the crawling sky above. Deep grass rustled against his legs. He stared suddenly into Jeremy's set face.
"What do you mean?" he said thickly. But to himself, in his mind, he muttered triumphantly: "He's noticed it too! He's noticed it too! Ruth wouldn't believe me when we came here before, but it's true, it's true!"
"The air has a funny smell, sir," Jeremy said slowly. "Like—like earth, or dirt. Like a mushroom cellar or somethin'. I must be crazy, sir, but it seems to hang all around here, heavy-like."
Crazy? Paul choked out a jangling laugh, full of triumph. No, not crazy. Not yet. Jeremy was right. This place—this ancient abode of infernal silence and monstrous horror—was alive within itself. It breathed and felt. It was no part of the woods around it.
But Jeremy wouldn't understand. The explanation was far too intricate and vague and impossible for him. Yet it was true. The atmosphere surrounding this structure before them, the air that clung tenaciously to the entire clearing, was a living entity, a dull leaden thing, visible to eyes that dared seek it out. It was a part of the inn itself, having no connection, no acquaintance, with the air about it. It reeked up out of the very earth, and from the decaying walls of the building, and from the bodies of the dead-alive creatures who inhabited the place.
But to Jeremy it was simply a creepy sensation, vaguely inexplicable and unpleasant. And so Paul moved on, more and more slowly, cautioning his companion to complete silence.
Thus they reached the side of the inn itself, and Paul crouched there in utter darkness, with the great structure hunched over him, mastodonic and gaunt, enveloped in its pall of dull, moving, viscous exhalation.
For an instant Paul clung there, unable to put down his deepening dread. All the ancient horrors rushed upon him viciously, striving to shatter the walls of his mind and send him back, back down the road, reeling and laughing and screaming in madness, as they had done on that other night seven months ago. And then, slowly, he stood erect until he could peer through the cracked shutter. And hung there, rigid and flat-pressed against the window-ledge, staring.
Only a vague semicircle of illumination was visible inside through the filthy window glass. There at a small square table against the farther wall, unaware of Paul's presence, sat a long figure. The oil lamp on the table, peculiarly shaded with an agate cup-shaped globe, cast a restless, unreal glow into the man's face.
An ugly face it was, in the full horrible significance of the word. A sunken savage gargoyle, frog-like in shape, with narrow close-set eyes blinking continually beneath beetled brows that crawled together, like thick hairy fingers, in the center. The broad nose, twisted hookwise, seemed stuck on, like a squatting toad with bunched legs. And the mouth was wide, thick, sensuous, half leering as if it could assume no other expression.
The man made no movement. Apparently in a state of semi-stupor, he leaned on the table in the near gloom. Beyond him the feeble light played up and down the cream-colored wall and over the worn green carpet, revealing shadowed shapes of other tables and other chairs and objects without definite form.
Paul stared, utterly fascinated and terrified, clutching the window-sill with white hands, standing stiff and unalive in the darkness. He might have clung there indefinitely, remembering every separate fear of his last visit here, had not Jeremy's guarded voice hissed suddenly behind him:
"Somethin's comin', sir! A car!"
Paul turned. A faint purring sound came to his ears from somewhere down the road. He stepped forward violently and seized Jeremy's arm.
"Down!" he cried sharply. "Get down, man!" And then he was flat in the deep grass, heaving, breathing heavily, with Jeremy prone beside him, so close that their bodies fused together.
"What is it, sir?" Jeremy whispered.
"Be still!"
In the road, the purring became an audible drone, as of a motor. Nearer and nearer it came, and then, just once, a muted horn shrilled out, sending a muffled blast through the night. Twin headlights took form and grew into glaring, accusing orbs.
At that moment the door of the inn opened, creaking back softly. A lantern swung in the aperture, dangling from an uplifted hand; and the man with the toad face scuffed slowly over the threshold, muttering to himself and blinking his eyes. Bent, twisted grotesquely, he limped down the stone flagging a dozen paces and stood still, holding the lantern high.
The headlights of the oncoming car became brilliant bowls of fire, cutting slantwise through the unearthly mist of the grounds. They slowed and sto
pped, and the drone of the engine became suddenly still. The lights were extinguished. The car door clicked and swung open. A voice—a girl's voice, vaguely timid and afraid and fantastically out of place in such sordid surroundings—said:
"This—this is the place you are bringing me?"
And the voice that answered her was somehow packed with subtlety, gloating and possessive in spite of its quite smoothness.
"Certainly, my dear. You will enjoy yourself."
Two shapes materialized. Shadows in the gloom, nothing more, they moved down the path to where the lantern swayed before them. Then the outer rays of the light encompassed them, and Paul stared mutely with every ounce of color ebbed from his face.
A man and a girl. Man-and-a-girl. It surged over and over in his brain. God! After seven months, the horror was still going on, still happening! The man—the man was like all the others, tall, straight, smiling, attired in immaculate evening clothes. The girl was young and lovely and radiant in a trailing white gown and flame-colored velvet wrap. But she was not happy; she was not a willing guest. She was afraid and helpless, and her oval face was pathetically pale in the lantern glow—pale as alabaster; the face of one who was very close to death, and knew it, and had no resistance left in body or soul to fight against it.
She walked mechanically, staring straight ahead of her. And then the glare of the lantern swept full over her, revealing a mark—but no one would have seen it who did not look closely. Jeremy did not notice it, certainly. Only Paul discerned it—Paul, who was praying that the mark would not be there.
A mere patch of whiteness, where the girl had tried in vain to cover, with powder, a pair of ghastly crimson incisions, fiendishly significant. And the marks themselves were faintly visible as she came closer in the accusing halo of the uplifted lantern.
She stopped very abruptly then, and peered at the hideous face behind the upraised arm. She trembled and shrank away from it, and a subdued frightened whisper came involuntarily from her lips. Her companion put his arm about her and laughed, glanced indifferently at the man with the lantern, and laughed again, mockingly.
"It's only Murgunstrumm, my dear. He wouldn't harm a fly. He wouldn't know how, really. Come."
The girl paced on, walking like one already dead, like one who had been so long in the clutch of fear that nothing more mattered. The lantern cast a long gaunt shadow on the walk as she stepped in front of it. One long shadow—only one. The man in evening clothes, pacing just behind his lovely comrade, left nothing. Nothing but empty glaring whiteness....
They went inside; and Murgunstrumm, scuffing over the sill behind them, reached out an abnormally long arm to swing the heavy door shut. The last thing Paul saw, as the lantern light died behind the closing barrier, was the unholy grin which transfigured that toad like face. Then—then something possessed him.
He was on his feet blindly, fists clenched until the palms of his hands stabbed with pain.
"Great God, don't let them do it! Don't—"
He stumbled forward, thrashing through the deep grass, retching with the sudden turmoil which roared within him. Frantically he staggered toward the door of the inn, mad, unreasoning, knowing only that he could not stand still and let the horror continue.
He would have rushed to the door, then, and hammered upon it, screaming to the heavens above him; would have slashed his way into the house and fought —fought with hands and teeth and feet in a mad attempt to drag the girl from that foul embrace; would have continued until they overwhelmed him, killed him. All to no purpose!
But luck saved him. His blundering foot twisted beneath him as it cracked against an immovable something in the grass. Agony welled up through his leg, letting him down. He pitched violently forward and plunged headlong.
And the madness left him as he lay there, gasping. Ahead of him he heard the door of the inn creak open. A probing shaft of lantern light swept the clearing, and Murgunstrumm stood there on the threshold, peering out. Then the innkeeper muttered something inaudible, and the door closed again. The light vanished. The clearing was very dark and still.
What a fool he was! In the fury of a moment's insanity he had come within an inch of condemning Ruth forever to the asylum. He had come within an instant of awful death, when life was the most necessary possession in the world. The girl in the flame-colored wrap was beyond his power to save. Beyond any power, except of a merciful God. The mark of the vampire was already imprinted in her throat. She was a slave of the demon who had stolen her soul. Nothing could help her now.
Paul's hands dug savagely into his face. A snarl came from his throat as he lay there in the deep grass. And then another sound, behind him, took his attention as something wriggled close. Jeremy's voice said in a thick whisper:
"You—you're all right, sir?"
"Yes, I'm all right."
"You ain't hurt, sir?"
"No. Not—hurt."
"Will we try to break into the place? That girl, she looked as if they might mean to do some damage—"
"No. It's too late."
Paul reached out and gripped the big man's arm. He lay still for a moment then, waiting for strength to return. Then, with a warning whisper, he began to crawl backward through the grass. Not once did he take his gaze from that closed barrier. Inch by inch he retreated until at last the deep grass gave way to underbrush and crackling bushes, and sheltering black trees loomed over him. Rising, he stood in the darkness until Jeremy joined him. Then together they crept silently back to the road.
"Listen," Jeremy cautioned him suddenly.
They stood quite still. A burst of laughter—feminine laughter, wild and shrill and vaguely mad—pursued them. Paul shuddered, took a step forward. Then, with an effort, he turned and hurried on again. He said nothing until the roadhouse, with its pall of evanescent vapor, was buried again in the gloom behind them. Then he muttered grimly:
"Did you see, clearly, the man in evening clothes?"
Jeremy's big body twitched as if something had jostled him. He turned a white, frightened face.
"That feller, sir," he whispered huskily, "there was somethin' creepy about him. When he stepped in front of the lantern back there—"
"You saw it too?"
"I don't know what it was, sir, but he didn't seem natural."
"I know," Paul said.
"Who is he, sir?"
"I don't know. I only know what he is."
"And the cripple, sir. He's the same Murgunstrumm feller the hotel man was tellin' us about?"
"The cripple." Paul replied, and his voice was low and vibrant and full of hate, "is Murgunstrumm."
They paced on in silence after that. Reaching the car, they got in quickly.
Jeremy stuck the key in the slot and turned it. The motor coughed, purred softly. The black roadster jerked backward, swung fretfully about, reversed again, and straightened with a lunge.
"Back to the hotel, sir?" Jeremy said sharply.
Paul answered, almost inaudibly; "Yes. Back to the hotel."
6. Kermeff and Allenby
At seven o'clock the following evening a large gray touring car, smeared and panting from sixty miles of fast travel, crunched to a stop before the Rehobeth Hotel. Twilight had already swooped down on the little community. A murky gloom welled up from the valley below. Lights blinked in the shadows, and the village lay silent and peaceful in the lassitude of coming night.
The car door clicked open. A gray-coated figure slid from the chauffeur's seat and moved quietly to the rear, glancing queerly, frowningly at the hotel. Mechanically he pulled open the rear door.
The two men who descended after him were, it was evident, somehow in at ease and vaguely apprehensive. For an instant they clung close to the car, scowling unpleasantly and impatiently. They exchanged glances and comments. Then, with a word to the driver, they advanced to the steps.
Old Gates, aroused by the sound of the machine's arrival, met them in the doorway. Squinting at them, he asked hesitantly:
>
"Be ye lookin' for someone, sirs?"
"For Mr. James Potter," the larger of the two said distinctly. "He expects us. We should like to go directly to his rooms, if you please."
"To be sure, sir," Gates grimaced. "I'll take ye right up now, I will. Come this way. sir."
"Er—it will perhaps be better if we go up alone. Will you direct us?"
Gates blinked, and stared more intently then, as if distrustful. But he turned with a shrug and said, rather stiffly:
"Of course, sir. Walk right through the lobby here and up the stairs, and turn right and go straight down the hail to the last door."
"Thank you."
Kermeff and Allenby ascended the stairs slowly, with Kermeff in the lead. They were strange companions, these two. Of different nationalities, they differed also in face and form, and obviously in temperament. Kermeff, the larger, was a bull-shouldered, aggressive man with huge hands that gripped the railing viciously. He possessed a sensitive mouth and keen eyes that declared him fiery, alert, possibly headstrong, and as stubborn as stone.
Allenby, trailing behind him, was smaller, wiry in stature, stern and deliberate of movement. Sullen, aloof, he climbed without a word and without a backward glance.
Together they strode along the upper landing to the door of James Potter's room. Kermeff knocked sharply. The door opened, framing Matt Jeremy on the threshold.
"Mr. Potter?" Kermeff said gutturally.
"Yes, sir," Jeremy nodded. "Come right in."
Kermeff stepped over the sill. Allenby, hesitating an instant, peered up and down the corridor, shrugged and followed him closely. Very quietly, unobtrusively, Jeremy closed the door as he had been told to do.
A single lamp, not too efficient, burned on the desk in the corner. Beside it Paul Hill leaned silently against the wall, waiting. Kermeff and Allenby, pacing into the room, saw him each at the same moment.
The big man stiffened as if a wire had been drawn taut within him. He flung up his head and stared. He wet his lips and sucked a long noisy breath into them. Allenby took a sudden step forward, stopped abruptly and stood quite still.