And here stood I, alone with the unknown monster.
What was that? The creak of ancient hinges! I shrank back against the wall, my blood freezing. The door through which I had just come was slowly opening! A sudden gust of wind shuddered through. The door swung wide, but I, nerving myself to meet the sight of some horror framed in the opening, saw nothing!
Moonlight, as in all of the rooms on this side of the hall, streamed through the hall door and lay on the opposite wall. If any invisible thing was coming from that adjoining room, the moonlight was not at its back. Yet a distorted shadow fell across the wall which shone in the moonlight and moved forward.
Now I saw it clearly, though the angle at which it was thrown deformed it. A broad, shambling figure, stooped, head thrust forward, long man-like arms dangling--the whole thing was hideously suggestive of the human, yet fearsomely unlike. This I read in the approaching shadow, yet saw no solid form that might throw this shadow.
Then panic seized me and I jerked the trigger again and again, filling the empty house with crashing reverberations and the acrid smell of powder, aiming first at the doorway in front of me, then in desperation sending the last bullet straight into the gliding shadow. Just so Joe Cagle must have done in the last terrible moment which preceded his death. The hammer fell hollowly on a discharged shell and I hurled the empty gun wildly. Not an instant had halted the unseen thing--now the shadow was close upon me.
My back-flung hands encountered the door--tore at the knob. It held! The door was locked! Now on the wall beside me, the shadow loomed up black and horrific. Two great treelike arms were raised--with a scream I hurled my full weight against the door. It gave way with a splintering crash and I fell through into the room beyond.
The rest is nightmare. I scrambled up without a glance behind me and rushed into the hall. At the far end I saw, as through a fog, the stair landing and toward it I rushed. The hall was long--it seemed endless. It seemed as though it stretched into Eternity and that I fled for hours down that grisly corridor. And a black shadow kept pace with me, flying along the moonlit wall, vanishing for an instant in black darkness, reappearing an instant later in a square of moonlight, let in by some outer window.
Down the hall it kept by my side, falling upon the wall at my left, telling me that whatever thing threw that shadow, was close at my back. It has long been said that a ghost will fling a shadow in the moonlight, even when it itself is invisible to the human sight. But no man ever lived whose ghost could throw such a silhouette. Such thoughts as these did not enter my mind tangibly as I fled; I was in the grip of unreasoning fear, but piercing through the fogs of my horror, was the knowledge that I was faced by some supernatural thing, which was at once unearthly and bestial.
Now I was almost at the stair; but now the shadow fell in front of me! The thing was at my very back--was reaching hideous unseen arms to clutch me! One swift glance over my shoulder showed me something else: on the dust of the corridor, close upon the footprints I left, other footprints were forming! Huge misshapen footprints, that left the marks of talons! With a terrible scream I swerved to the right, leaping for an open outer window as a drowning man seizes a rope--without conscious thought.
My shoulder struck the side of the window; I felt empty air under my feet--caught one whirling, chaotic glimpse of the moon, sky and the dark pine trees, as the earth rushed up to meet me, then black oblivion crashed about me.
My first sensation of returning consciousness was of soft hands lifting my head and caressing my face. I lay still, my eyes closed, trying to orient myself--I could not remember where I was, or what had happened. Then with a rush it all came back to me. My eyes flared open and I struggled wildly to rise.
"Steve, oh Steve, are you hurt?"
Surely I was insane, for it was the voice of Joan! No! My head was cradled in her lap, her large dark eyes, bright with tears, gazed down into mine.
"Joan! In God's name, what are you doing here?" I sat up, drawing her into my arms. My head throbbed nauseatingly; I was sore and bruised. Above us rose the stark grim wall of the Deserted House, and I could see the window from which I had fallen. I must have lain senseless for a long time, for now the moon lay red as blood close to the western horizon, glimmering in a scarlet wallow through the tops of the pines.
"The horse you rode away came back riderless. I couldn't stand to sit and wait--so I slipt out of the house and came here. They told me you'd gone to find the posse, but the horse came back the old tote road. There wasn't anyone to send so I slipt away and came myself."
"Joan!" the sight of her forlorn figure and the thought of her courage and love took hold of my heart and I kissed her without speaking.
"Steve," her voice came low and frightened, "what happened to you? When I rode up, you lay here unconscious, just like those other two men who fell from those windows--only they were killed."
"And only pure chance saved me, despite my powerful frame and heavy bones," I answered. "Once out of a hundred times a fall like that fails to injure a man--Joan, what happened in that house twenty years ago to throw a curse upon it?"
She shivered. "I don't know. The people who owned it before the war had to sell it afterwards. The tenants let it fall into disrepair, of course. A strange thing happened there just before the death of the last tenant. A huge gorilla escaped from a circus which was passing through the country and took refuge in the house. He fought so terribly when they tried to recapture him that they had to kill him. That was over twenty years ago. Shortly after that, the owner of the house fell from an upstairs window and was killed.
Everyone supposed he committed suicide or was walking in his sleep, but--"
"No!" I broke in with a shudder. "He was being hunted through those horrible rooms by a thing so terrible that death itself was an escape. And that travelling man--I know what killed him--and Joe Cagle--"
"Joe Cagle!" she started violently. "Where--"
"Don't worry, child," I soothed. "He's past harming you. Don't ask me any more. No, I didn't kill him; his death was more horrible than any I could have dealt. There are worlds and shadows of worlds beyond our ken, and bestial earth-bound spirits lurk in the dark shadows of our world, it may be. Come, let us go."
She had brought two horses with her, and had tethered them a short distance from the house. I made her mount and then, despite her protests and pleas, I returned to the house. I went only as far as a first story window and I stayed only a few moments. Then I also mounted, and together we rode slowly down the old tote road. The stars were paling and the east was beginning to whiten with the coming morn.
"You have not told me what haunts that house," said Joan in an awed voice, "but I know it's something frightful; what are we to do?"
For answer I turned in my saddle and pointed. We had rounded a bend in the old road and could just glimpse the old house through the trees. As we looked, a red lance of flame leaped up, smoke billowed to the morning sky, and a few minutes later a deep roar came to us, as the whole building began to fall into the insatiate flames I had started before we left. The ancients have always maintained that fire is the final destroyer, and I knew as I watched, that the ghost of the dead gorilla was lain, and the shadow of the beast forever lifted from the pine lands.
The Dead Slaver's Tale
Dim and grey was the silent sea,
Dim was the crescent moon;
From the jungle back of the shadowed lea
Came a tom-tom's eerie croon
When we glutted the waves with a hundred slaves
From a Jekra barracoon.
Our way to bar, a man of war
Was sailing with canvas full;
So the doomed men up from the hold we bore,
Hacked them to pieces and hurled them o'er,
And we heard the grim sharks as they tore
The flesh from each sword-cleft skull.
Then fast we fled toward the rising sun
But we could not flee the dead
And ev
er behind our flying ship
Wavered a trail of red.
She sank like a stone off Calabar
With all of her bloody crew.
There was no breeze to shake a spar,
No reef her hull to hew.
But dusky hands rose out of the deep,
And dragged her under the blue.
Dermod's Bane
If your heart is sick in your breast and a blind black curtain of sorrow is between your brain and your eyes so that the very sunlight is pale and leprous--go to the city of Galway, in the county of the same name, in the province of Connaught, in the country of Ireland.
In the grey old City of Tribes, as they call it, there is a dreamy soothing spell that is like enchantment, and if you are of Galway blood, no matter how far away, your grief will pass slowly from you like a dream, leaving only a sad sweet memory, like the scent of a dying rose. There is a mist of antiquity hovering over the old city which mingles with sorrow and makes one forget. Or you can go out into the blue Connaught hills and feel the salt sharp tang of the wind off the Atlantic, and life seems faint and far away, with all its sharp joys and bitter sorrows, and no more real than the shadows of the clouds which pass.
I came to Galway as a wounded beast crawls back to his lair in the hills. The city of my people broke upon my gaze for the first time, but it did not seem strange or foreign. It seemed like a homecoming to me, and with each day passing the land of my birth seemed farther and farther away and the land of my ancestors closer.
I came to Galway with an aching heart. My twin sister, whom I loved as I never loved anyone else, had died. Her going was swift and unexpected. It seemed to my mazed agony that one moment she was laughing beside me with her cheery smile and bright grey Irish eyes, and the next, the cold bitter grass was growing above her. Oh, my soul to God, not your Son alone endured crucifixion.
A black cloud like a shroud locked about me and in the dim borderland of madness I sat alone, tearless and speechless. My grandmother came to me at last, a great grim old woman, with hard haunted eyes that held all the woes of the Irish race.
"Let you go to Galway, lad. Let you go to the ould land. Maybe the sorrow of you will be drowned in the cold salt sea. Maybe the folk of Connaught can heal the wound that is on you--"
I went to Galway.
Well, the people were kind there--all those great old families, the Martins, the Lynches, the Deanes, the Dorseys, the Blakes, the Kirowans--families of the fourteen great families who rule Galway.
Out on the hills and in the valleys I roved and talked with the kindly, quaint country folk, many of whom still spoke the good old Erse language which I could speak haltingly.
There, on a hill one night before a shepherd's fire I heard again the old legend of Dermod O'Connor. As the shepherd unfolded the terrible tale in his rich brogue, interlaced with many Gaelic phrases, I remembered that my grandmother had told me the tale when I was a child, but I had forgotten the most of it.
Briefly the story is this: there was a chief of the Clan na O'Connor and his name was Dermod, but people called him the Wolf. The O'Connors were kings in the old days, ruling Connaught with a hand of steel.
They divided the rule of Ireland with the O'Briens in the South--Munster--and the O'Neills in the North--Ulster. With the O'Rourkes they fought the MacMurroughs of Leinster and it was Dermot MacMurrough, driven out of Ireland by the O'Connors, who brought in Strongbow and his Norman adventurers. When Earl Pembroke, whom men called Strongbow, landed in Ireland, Roderick O'Connor was king of Ireland in name and claim at least. And the clan O'Connor, fierce Celtic warriors that they were, kept up their struggle for freedom until at last their power was broken by a terrible Norman invasion. All honor to the O'Connors. In the old times my people fought under their banners--but each tree has a rotten root. Each great house has its black sheep. Dermod O'Connor was the black sheep of his clan and a blacker one never lived.
His hand was against all men, even his own house. He was no chieftain, fighting to regain the crown of Erin or to free his people; he was a red-handed reaver and he preyed alike on Norman and Celt; he raided into The Pale and he carried torch and steel into Munster and Leinster. The O'Briens and the O'Carrolls had cause to curse him, and the O'Neills hunted him like a wolf.
He left a trail of blood and devastation wherever he rode and at last, his band dwindling from desertions and constant fighting, he alone remained, hiding in caves and hills, butchering lone travellers for the sheer lust of blood that was on him, and descending on lonely farmers' houses or shepherds' huts to commit atrocities on their women folk. He was a giant of a man and the legends make of him something inhuman and monstrous. It must be truth that he was strange and terrible in appearance.
But his end came at last. He murdered a youth of the Kirowan clan and the Kirowans rode out of the city of Galway with vengeance in their hearts. Sir Michael Kirowan met the marauder alone in the hills--Sir Michael, a direct ancestor of mine, whose very name I bear. Alone they fought with only the shuddering hills to witness that terrible battle, till the clash of steel reached the ears of the rest of the clan who were riding hard and scouring the countryside.
They found Sir Michael badly wounded and Dermod O'Connor dying with a cleft shoulder bone and a ghastly wound in his breast. But such was their fury and hatred, that they flung a noose about the dying robber's neck and hanged him to a great tree on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea.
"And," said my friend the shepherd, stirring the fire, "the peasant folk still point out the tree and call it Dermod's Bane, after the Danish manner, and men have seen the great outlaw o' nights, and him gnashing his great tushes and spouting blood from shoulder and breast and swearin' all manner o' ill on the Kirowans and their blood for all time to come.
"And so, sir, let you not walk in the cliffs over the sea by night for you are of the blood he hates and the same name of the man who felled him is on you. For let you laugh if so be your will, but the ghost of Dermod O'Connor the Wolf is abroad o' dark night and the moon out of the sky, and him with his great black beard and ghastly eyes and boar tushes."
They pointed me out the tree, Dermod's Bane, and strangely like a gallows it looked, standing there as it had stood for how many hundred years I do not know, for men live long in Ireland and trees live longer.
There were no other trees near and the cliff rose sheer from the sea for four hundred feet. Below was only the deep sinister blue of the waves, deep and dark, breaking on the cruel rocks.
I walked much in the hills at night for when the silence of the darkness was on the world and no speech or noises of men to hold my thoughts, my sorrow was dark on my heart again and I walked on the hills where the stars seemed close and warm. And often my mazed brain wondered which star she was on, or if she had turned to a star.
One night the old, sharp agony returned unbearably. I rose from my bed--for I was staying at the time in a little mountain inn--and dressed and went into the hills. My temples throbbed and there was an unbearable weight about my heart. My dumb frozen soul shrieked up to God but I could not weep. I felt I must weep or go mad. For never a tear had passed my eyelids since--
Well, I walked on and on, how long or how far I do not know. The stars were hot and red and angry and gave me no comfort that night. At first I wanted to scream and howl and throw myself on the ground and tear the grass with my teeth. Then that passed and I wandered as in a trance. There was no moon and in the dim starlight the hills and their trees loomed dark and strange. Over the summits I could see the great Atlantic lying like a dusky silver monster and I heard her faint roaring.
Something flitted in front of me and I thought that it was a wolf. But there have been no wolves in Ireland for many and many a year. Again I saw the thing, a long low shadowy shape. I followed it mechanically.
Now in front of me I saw a cliff overlooking the sea. On the cliff 's edge was a single great tree that loomed up like a gibbet. I approached this.
Then in front of
me, as I neared the tree, a vague mist hovered. A strange fear spread over me as I watched stupidly. A form became evident. Dim and silky, like a shred of moon-mist, but with an undoubted human shape. A face--I cried out!
A vague, sweet face floated before me, indistinct, mist-like--yet I made out the shimmery mass of dark hair, the high pure forehead, the red curving lips--the serious soft grey eyes--
"Moira!" I cried in agony and rushed forward, my aching arms spread wide, my heart bursting in my bosom.
She floated away from me like a mist blown by a breeze; now she seemed to waver in space--I felt myself staggering wildly on the very edge of the cliff, whither my blind rush had led me. As a man wakes from a dream I saw in one flashing instant the cruel rocks four hundred feet below, I heard the hungry lapping of the waves--as I felt myself falling forward I saw the vision, but now it was changed hideously.
Great tusk-like teeth gleamed ghoulishly through a matted black beard. Terrible eyes blazed under penthouse brows; blood flowed from a wound in the shoulder and a ghastly gash in the broad breast--
"Dermod O'Connor!" I screamed, my hair bristling. "Avaunt, fiend out of Hell--"
I swayed out for the fall I could not check, with death waiting four hundred feet below. Then a soft small hand closed on my wrist and I was drawn irresistibly back. I fell, but back on the soft green grass at the lip of the cliff, not to the keen-edged rocks and waiting sea below. Oh, I knew--I could not be wrong.
The small hand was gone from my wrist, the hideous face gone from the cliff edge--but that grasp on my wrist that drew me back from my doom--how could I fail to recognize it? A thousand times had I felt the dear touch of that soft hand on my arm or in my own hand. Oh Moira, Moira, pulse of my heart, in life and in death you were ever at my side.
And now for the first time I wept and lying on my face with my face in my hands, I poured my racked heart out in scalding, blinding and soul-easing tears, until the sun came up over the blue Galway hills and limned the branches of Dermod's Bane with a strange new radiance.
The Best Horror Stories of Page 14