Judson dropped the empty rifle into the wagon box, and turned a white, frightened face toward me. His mouth was open, his eyes protruding with terror. He shouted something incoherent, which I did not grasp, and snatched at the reins. Apparently insane with fear, he cursed the leaping grays, and lashed at them, as if thinking to outrun the pack.
* * * *
For a little time I clung to the side of the rocking wagon. Then the snorting horses turned suddenly, almost breaking the wagon tongue. We were nearly upset. The spring seat was dislodged from its position, and fell into the wagon box. I was thrown half over the side of the wagon. For another agonized moment I tried to scramble back. Then the grays plunged forward again, and I was flung into the snow.
I broke through the thin crust. The thick, soft snow beneath checked the force of my fall. In a few moments I had floundered to my feet, and was clawing madly at my face, to get the white, powdery stuff away from my eyes.
The wagon was already a hundred yards away. The fear-maddened horses were still running, with Judson standing erect in the wagon, sawing wildly at the reins, but powerless to curb them. They had been turning abruptly when I was thrown out.
Now they were plunging back toward the weirdly baying pack!
Judson, screaming and cursing, crazed with terror, was being carried back toward the dimly seen, gray, leaping shapes whose uncanny howling sobbed so dreadfully through the moonlight.
Horror came over me, like a great, soul-chilling wave. I felt an insane desire to run across the snow, to run and run until I could not hear the wailing of the strange pack. With an effort I controlled myself, schooled my trembling limbs, swallowed to wet my dry throat.
I knew that my poor, floundering run could never distance the amazingly fleet gray shapes that bounded through the silver haze of moonlight toward the wagon. And I reminded myself that I had a weapon, a .25 caliber automatic pistol, slung beneath my shoulder. Something about the strange message from my father had made me fasten on the deadly little weapon, and slip a few extra clips of ammunition into my pockets.
With trembling hands, I pulled off a glove and fumbled inside my garments for the little weapon.
* * * *
At last I drew out the heavy little automatic, gratefully warm with the heat of my body, and snapped back the slide to be sure that a cartridge was in the chamber. Then I stood there, in a bank of powdery snow that came nearly to my knees, and waited.
The dismal, alien howl of the pack froze me into a queer paralysis of fear. And then I was the horrified spectator of a ghastly tragedy.
The wagon must have been four hundred yards from me, across the level, glistening snow, when the dim gray shapes of the baying pack left the trail and ran straight across toward it. I saw little stabs of yellow flame, heard sharp reports of guns, and the thin, whistling screams of bullets. Judson, I suppose, had dropped the reins and was trying to defend himself with the rifle and shotgun, and his old-fashioned revolver.
The vague gray shapes surrounded the wagon. I heard the scream of an agonized horse—except for the unearthly howling of that pack, the most terrible, nerve-wracking sound I know. A struggling mass of faintly seen figures seemed to surround the wagon. There were a few more shots, then a shriek, which rang fearfully over the snow, bearing an agony of pain and terror that is inconceivable.… I knew it came from Judson.
After that, the only sound was the strange, blood-congealing belling of the pack—an awful outcry that had not been stilled.
Soon—fearfully soon—that alien ululation seemed to be drawing nearer. And I saw gray shapes come bounding down the trail, away from the grim scene of the tragedy—toward me!
CHAPTER III
THE WOLF AND THE WOMAN
I can give no conception of the stark, maddened terror that seized me when I knew that the gray animals were running on my trail. My heart seemed to pause, until I thought I would grow dizzy and fall. Then it was thumping loudly in my throat. My body was suddenly cold with sweat. My muscles knotted until I was gripping the automatic with painful force.
I had determined not to run, for it was madness to try to escape the pack. But my resolution to stand my ground was nothing in the face of the fear that obsessed me.
I plunged across the level waste of snow. My feet broke through the thin crust. I floundered along, with laboring lungs. The snow seemed tripping me like a malevolent demon. Many times I stumbled, it seemed. And twice I sprawled in the snow, and scrambled desperately to my feet, and struggled on again, sobbing with terror, gasping in the cold air.
But my flight was cut short. The things that ran behind me could travel many times faster than I. Turning, when I must have gone less than a hundred yards, I saw them drawing near behind me, still vague gray shapes in the moonlight. I now perceived that only two had followed.
Abruptly I recalled the little automatic in my hand. I raised it, and emptied it, firing as rapidly as I could. But if I hit either of those bounding gray figures, they certainly were invulnerable to my bullets.
I had sought in my pocket for another clip, and was trying with quivering fingers to slip it into the gun, when those things came near enough, in a milky haze of moonlight, to be seen distinctly. Then my hands closed in rigid paralysis upon the gun—I was too astounded and unstrung to complete the operation of loading.
One of those two gray shapes was a wolf. A gaunt prairie wolf, covered with long, shaggy hair. A huge beast, he must have stood three feet high at the shoulder. He was not standing now, however, but coming toward me with great leaps that covered many yards. His great eyes glowed with a weird, greenish, unnatural light—terrible and strange and somehow hypnotic.
And the other was a girl.
* * * *
It was incredible. It numbed and staggered my terror-dazed mind. At first I thought it must be a hallucination. But as she came nearer, advancing with long, bounding steps, as rapidly as the gray wolf, I could no longer discredit my eyes. I recalled the weird suggestion of a human voice I had caught in the unearthly cry of the pack; recalled what Connell and Judson had told me of human footprints mingled with those of wolves in the trail the pack had left.
She was clad very lightly, to be abroad in the bitter cold of the winter night. Apparently, she wore only a torn, flimsy slip, of thin white silk, which hung from one shoulder, and came not quite to her knees. Her head was bare, and her hair, seeming in the moonlight to be an odd, pale yellow, was short and tangled. Her smooth arms and small hands, her legs, and even her flashing feet, were bare. Her skin was white, with a cold, leprous, bloodless whiteness. Almost as white as the snow.
And her eyes shone green.
They were like the gray wolf’s eyes, blazing with a terrible emerald flame, with the fire of an alien, unearthly life. They were malevolent, merciless, hideous. They were cold as the cosmic wastes beyond the light of stars. They burned with an evil light, with a malicious intelligence, stronger and more fearful than that of any being on earth.
Across her lips, and her cheeks of alabaster whiteness, was a darkly red and dripping smear, almost black by moonlight.
I stood like a wooden man, nerveless with incredulous horror.
On came the girl and the wolf, springing side by side through the snow. They seemed to have preternatural strength, an agility beyond that of nature.
As they came nearer, I received another shock of terror.
The woman’s face was familiar, for all its dreadful pallor and the infernal evil of the green, luminous eyes, and the red stain on her lips and cheeks. She was a girl whom I had known. A girl whom I had admired, whom I had even dreamed that I might come to love.
She was Stella Jetton!
This girl was the lovely daughter of Dr. Blake Jetton, whom, as I have said, my father had brought with him to this Texas ranch, to assist with his revolutionary experiments.
* * * *
It came to me that she had been changed in some fearful way. For this could be no sane, ordinary human girl—this s
trange, green-eyed being, half-clad, white-skinned, who ran over the moonlit snow beside a gaunt gray wolf, with dripping red upon her fearfully pallid skin!
“Stella!” I cried.
More a scream of frightened, anguished unbelief, than a human voice, the name came from my fear-parched throat. I was startled at my own call, hoarse, inchoate, gasping.
The huge gray wolf came directly at me, as if it were going to spring at my throat. But it stopped crouching in the snow, watching me with alert and strange intelligence in its dreadful green eyes.
And the woman came even nearer, before she paused, standing with bare feet in the snow, and stared at me with terrible eyes like those of the wolf—luminous and green and filled with an evil, alien will.
The face, ghastly white, and fearfully red-stained as it was, was the face of Stella Jetton. But the eyes were not hers! No, the eyes were not Stella’s!
They were the eyes of some hideous monstrosity. The eyes of some inconceivable, malevolent entity, from some frozen hell of the far-off, night-black cosmic void!
Then she spoke. The voice had some little of its old, familiar ring. But there was a new, strange note in it. A note that bore the foreign, menacing mystery of the eyes and the leprous skin. A note that had a suggestion of the dismal, wailing ululation of the pack that had followed us.
“Yes, Stella Jetton,” the dreadful voice said. “What are you called? Are you Clovis McLaurin? Did you receive a telegram?”
She did not know me, apparently. Even the wording of her sentences was a little strange, as if she were speaking a language with which she was not very familiar. The delightful, human girl I had known was fearly changed: it was as if her fair body had been seized by some demoniac entity.
* * * *
It occurred to me that she must be afflicted with some form of insanity, which had given her the almost preternatural strength which she had displayed in running with the wolf-pack. Cases of lycanthropy, in which the sufferer imagines himself a wolf—or sometimes a tiger or some other animal—and imitates its actions, have been common enough in the annals of the insane. But if this is lycanthropy, I thought, it must indeed be a singular case.
“Yes, I’m Clovis McLaurin,” I said, in a shaken voice. “I got Dad’s telegram three days ago. Tell me what’s wrong—why he worded the message as he did!”
“Nothing is wrong, my friend,” this strange woman said. “We merely desired your assistance with certain experiments, of a great strangeness, which we are undertaking to perform. Your father now waits at the ranch, and I came to conduct you to him.”
This singular speech was almost incredible. I could accept it only on the assumption that the speaker suffered from some dreadful derangement of the mind.
“You came to meet me?” I exclaimed, fighting the horror that almost overwhelmed me. “Stella, you mustn’t be out in the cold without more wraps. You must take my coat.”
I began to strip off the garment. But, as I had somehow expected, she refused to accept it.
“No, I do not need it,” her strange voice told me. “The cold does not harm this body. And you must come with us, now. Your father waits for us at the house, to perform the great experiment.”
She said us! It gave me new horror to notice that she thus classed the huge gaunt wolf with herself.
Then she sprang forward with an incredible agility, leaping through the snow in the direction in which Judson and I had been traveling. With a naked, dead-white arm, she beckoned me to follow. And the great, gray wolf sprang behind me.
Nerved to sudden action, I recalled the half-loaded automatic in my hand. I snapped the fresh clip into position, jerked back the slide mechanism to get a cartridge into the breech, and then emptied the gun into that green-orbed wolf.
* * * *
A strange composure had come over me. My motions were calm enough, almost deliberate. I know that my hand did not shake. The wolf was standing still, only a few yards away. It is unlikely that I missed him at all, impossible that I missed him with every shot.
I know that I hit him several times, for I heard the bullets drive into his gaunt body, saw the animal jerk beneath their impact, and noticed gray hairs float from it in the moonlight.
But he did not fall. His terrible green eyes never wavered in their sinister stare of infernal evil.
Just as the gun was empty—it had taken me only a few seconds to fire the seven shots—I heard an angry, wolfish snarl from the woman, from the strange monster that Stella Jetton had become. I had half turned when her white body came hurtling at me like a projectile.
I went down beneath her, instinctively raising an arm to guard my throat. It is well that I did, for I felt her teeth sinking into my arm and shoulder, as we fell together into the snow.
I am sure that I screamed with the horror of it.
I fought at her madly, until I heard her strange, non-human voice again.
“You need not be afraid,” it said. “We are not going to kill you. We wish you to aid with a greatly remarkable experiment. For that reason, you must come with us. Your father waits. The wolf is our friend, and will not harm you. And your weapon will not hurt it.”
A curious, half-articulate yelp came from the throat of the great wolf, which had not moved since I shot at it, as if it had understood her words and gave affirmation.
The woman was still upon me, holding me flat in the snow, her bared, bloody teeth above my face, her fingers sunk claw-like into my body with almost preternatural strength. A low, bestial, growling sound came from her throat, and then she spoke again.
“You will now come with us, to the house where your father waits, to perform the experiment?” she demanded in that terrible voice, with its suggestion of the wolf-pack’s weird cry.
“I’ll come,” I agreed, relieved somewhat to discover that the strange pair of beasts did not propose to devour me on the spot. The woman—I cannot call her Stella, for except in body, she was not Stella!—helped me to my feet. She made no objection when I bent, and picked up the automatic, which lay in the snow, and slipped it into my coat pocket.
* * * *
She and the gaunt gray wolf, which my bullets had so strangely failed to kill, leaped away together over the moonlit snow. I followed, floundering along as rapidly as I could, my mind filled with confused and terror-numbed conjecture.
There was now no doubt remaining in my mind that the woman thought herself a member of the wolf-pack, no doubt that she actually was a member. A curious sympathy certainly seemed to exist between her and the great gaunt wolf beside her.
It must be some strange form of lunacy, I thought, though I had never read of a lycanthrope whose symptoms were exaggerated to the terrible extent that hers appeared to be. It is well known that maniacs have unnatural strength, but her feats of running and leaping across the snow were almost beyond reason.
But there was that about her which even the theory of insanity did not explain. The corpse-like pallor of her skin; the terrible green luminosity of her eyes; the way she spoke—as if English were an unfamiliar tongue to her, but half mastered. And there was something even more indefinite: a strangeness that smacked of the alien life of forbidden universes!
The pace set for me by the woman and the wolf was mercilessly rapid. Stumble along as best I could, I was unable to move as fast as they wished. Nor was I allowed to fall behind, for when I lagged, the wolf came back, and snarled at me menacingly.
Before I had floundered along many miles, my lungs aching, and I was half blind with fatigue. I stumbled and sprawled in the soft snow a last time. My tortured muscles refused to respond when I tried to rise. I lay there, ready to endure whatever the wolf might do, rather than undergo the agony of further effort.
But this time the woman came back. I was half unconscious, but I realized vaguely that she was lifting me, raising me to her shoulders. After that, my eyes were closed; I was too weary to watch my surroundings. But I knew dimly, from my sensations of swaying, that I was being carrie
d.
Presently the toxins of exhaustion overcame my best efforts to keep my senses. I fell into the deep sleep of utter fatigue, forgetting that my limbs were growing very cold, and that I was being borne upon the back of a woman endowed with the instincts of a wolf and the strength of a demon; a woman who, when I had last seen her, had been all human and lovable!
CHAPTER IV
A STRANGE HOMECOMING
Never can I forget the sensations of my awakening. I opened my eyes upon gloom relieved but faintly by dim red light. I lay upon a bed or couch, swathed in blankets. Hands that even to my chilled body seemed ice-cold were chafing my arms and legs. And terrible greenish orbs were swimming above in the terrible crimson darkness, staring down at me, horribly.
Alarmed, recalling what had happened in the moonlight as a vague, hideous nightmare, I collected my scattered senses, and struggled to a sitting position among the blankets.
It is odd, but the first definite thing that came to my confused brain was an impression of the ugly green flowers in monotonous rows across the dingy, brown-stained wallpaper. In the red light that filled the room they appeared unpleasantly black, but still they awakened an ancient memory. I knew that I was in the dining room of the old ranch house, where I had come to spend two years with my uncle, Tom McLaurin, many years before.
The weirdly illuminated chamber was sparsely furnished. The couch upon which I lay stood against one wall. Opposite was a long table, with half a dozen chairs pushed under it. Near the end of the room was a large heating stove, with a full scuttle of coal and a box of split pine kindling behind it.
There was no fire in the stove, and the room was very cold. My breath was a white cloud in that frosty atmosphere. The dim crimson light came from a small electric lantern standing on the long table. It had been fitted with a red bulb, probably for use in a photographer’s dark room.
All those impressions I must have gathered almost subconsciously, for my horrified mind was absorbed with the persons in the room.
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