Stern, with a word of hot anger, fingered his revolver. But Beatrice laid her hand upon his arm.
“Not yet!” begged she.
He glanced down at her, where she stood beside him at the empty embrasure of the window. The dim light from the vast and empty overarch of sky, powdered with a wonder of stars, showed him the vague outline of her face. Wistful and pale she was, yet very brave. Through Stern welled a sudden tenderness.
He put his arm around her, and for a moment her head lay on his breast.
But only a moment.
For, all at once, a snarling cry rang through the wood; and, with a northward surge of the torch-bearers, a confused tumult of shrieks, howls, simian chatterings and dull blows, the battle joined between those two vague, strange forces down below in the black forest.
CHAPTER XVII
STERN’S RESOLVE
How long it lasted, what its meaning, its details, the watchers could not tell. Impossible, from that height and in that gloom, broken only by an occasional pale gleam of moonlight through the drifting cloud-rack, to judge the fortunes of this primitive war.
They knew not the point at issue nor yet the tide of victory or loss. Only they knew that back and forth the torches flared, the war-drums boomed and rattled, the yelling, slaughtering, demoniac hordes surged in a swirl of bestial murder-lust.
And so time passed, and fewer grew the drums, yet the torches flared on; and, as the first gray dawn went fingering up the sky there came a break, a flight, a merciless pursuit.
Dimly the man and woman, up aloft, saw things that ran and shrieked and were cut down—saw things, there in the forest, that died even as they killed, and mingled the howl of triumph with the bubbling gasp of dissolution.
“Ugh! A beast war!” shuddered the engineer, at length, drawing Beatrice away from the window. “Come, it’s getting light, again. It’s too clear, now—come away!”
She yielded, waking as it were from the horrid fascination that had held her spell-bound. Down she sat on her bed of furs, covered her eyes with her hands, and for a while remained quite motionless. Stern watched her. And again his hand sought the revolver-butt.
“I ought to have waded into that bunch, long ago,” thought he. “We both ought to have. What it’s all about, who could tell? But it’s an outrage against the night itself, against the world, even dead though it be. If it hadn’t been for wasting good ammunition for nothing—!”
A curious, guttural whine, down there in the forest, attracted his attention. Over to the window he strode, and once again peered down.
A change had come upon the scene, a sudden, radical change. No more the sounds of combat rose; but now a dull, conclamant murmur as of victory and preparation for some ghastly rite.
Already in the center of the wood, hard by the spring, a little fire had been lighted. Even as Stern looked, dim, moving figures heaped on wood. The engineer saw whirling droves of sparks spiral upward; he saw dense smoke, followed by a larger flame.
And, grouped around this, already some hundreds of the now paling torches cast their livid glare.
Off to one side he could just distinguish what seemed to be a group engaged in some activity—but what this might be, he could not determine. Yet, all at once a scream of pain burst out, therefrom; and then a gasping cry that ended quickly and did not come again.
Another shriek, and still a third; and now into the leaping flames some dark, misshapen things were flung, and a great shout arose.
Then rose, also, a shrill, singsong whine; and suddenly drams roared, now with a different cadence.
“Hark!” said the engineer. “The torchmen must have exterminated the other bunch, and got possession of the drums. They’re using ‘em, themselves—and badly!”
By the firelight vague shapes came and went, their shadows grotesquely flung against the leafy screens. The figures quickened their paces and their gestures; then suddenly, with cries, flung themselves into wild activity. And all about the fire, Stern saw a wheeling, circling, eddying mob of black and frightful shapes.
“The swine!” he breathed. “Wait—wait till I make a pint or two of Pulverite!”
Even as he spoke, the concourse grew quiet with expectancy. A silence fell upon the forest. Something was being led forward toward the fire—something, for which the others all made way.
The wind freshened. With it, increased the volume of smoke. Another frightened bird, cheeping forlornly, fluttered above the treetops.
Then rose a cry, a shriek long-drawn and ghastly, that climbed till it broke in a bubbling, choking gasp.
Came a sharp clicking sound, a quick scuffle, a grunt; then silence once more.
And all at once the drums crashed; and the dance began again, madder, more obscenely hideous than ever.
“Voodoo!” gulped Stern. “Obeah-work! And—and the quicker I get my Pulverite to working, the better!”
Undecided no longer, determined now on a course of definite action without further delay, the engineer turned back into the room. Upon his forehead stood a cold and prickling sweat, of horror and disgust. But to his lips he forced a smile, as, in the half light of the red and windy dawn, he drew close to Beatrice.
Then all at once, to his unspeakable relief, he saw the girl was sleeping.
Utterly worn out, exhausted and spent with the long strain, the terrible fatigues of the past thirty-six hours, she had lain down and had dropped off to sleep. There she lay at full length. Very beautiful she looked, half seen in the morning gloom. One arm crossed her full bosom; the other pillowed her cheek. And, bending close, Stern watched her a long minute.
With strange emotion he heard her even breathing; he caught the perfume of her warm, ripe womanhood. Never had she seemed to him so perfect, so infinitely to be loved, to be desired.
And at thought of that beast-horde in the wood below, at realization of what might be, if they two should chance to be discovered and made captive, his face went hard as iron. An ugly, savage look possessed him, and he clenched both fists.
For a brief second he stooped still closer; he laid his lips soundlessly, gently upon her hair. And when again he stood up, the look in his eyes boded scant good to anything that might threaten the sleeping girl.
“So, now to work!” said he.
Into his own room he stepped quietly, his room where he had collected his various implements and chemicals. First of all he set out, on the floor, a two-quart copper tea-kettle; and beside this, choosing carefully, he ranged the necessary ingredients for a “making” of his secret explosive.
“Now, the wash-out water,” said he, taking another larger dish.
Over to the water-pail he walked. Then he stopped, suddenly, frowning a black and puzzled frown.
“What?” he exclaimed. “But—there isn’t a pint left, all together! Hem! Now then, here is a situation.”
Hastily he recalled how the great labors of the previous day, the wireless experiments and all, had prevented him from going out to the spring to replenish his supply. Now, though he bitterly cursed himself for his neglect, that did no good. The fact remained, there was no water.
“Scant pint, maybe!” said he. “And I’ve got to have a gallon, at the very least. To say nothing of drink for two people! And the horde, there, camping round the spring. Je-ru-salem!”
Softly he whistled to himself; then, trying to solve this vital, unexpected problem, fell to pacing the floor.
Day, slowly looming through the window, showed his features set and hard. Close at hand, the breath of morning winds stirred the treetops. But of the usual busy twitter and gossip of birds among the branches, now there was none. For down below there, in the forest, the ghoulish vampire revels still held sway.
Stern, at a loss, swore hotly under his breath.
Then suddenly he found himself; he came to a decision.
“I’m going down,” he vowed. “I’m going down, to see!”
CHAPTER XVIII
THE SUPREME QUESTION
Now that his course lay clear before him, the man felt an instant and a huge relief. Whatever the risks, the dangers, this adventuring was better than a mere inaction, besieged there in the tower by that ugly, misshapen horde.
First of all, as he had done on the first morning of the awakening, when he had left the girl asleep, he wrote a brief communication to forestall any possible alarm on her part. This, scrawled with charcoal on a piece of smooth hide, ran:
“Have had to go down to get water and lay of the land. Absolutely necessary. Don’t be afraid. Am between you and them, well armed. Will leave you both the rifle and the shotgun. Stay here, and have no fear. Will come back as soon as possible. Allan.”
He laid this primitive letter where, on awakening, she could not fail to see it. Then, making sure again that all the arms were fully charged, he put the rifle and the gun close beside his “note,” and saw to it that his revolvers lay loosely and conveniently in the holsters she had made for him.
One more reconnaissance he made at the front window. This done, he took the water-pail and set off quietly down the stairs. His feet were noiseless as a cat’s.
At every landing he stopped, listening intently. Down, ever down, story by story he crept.
To his chagrin—though he had half expected worse—he found that the boiler-explosion of the previous night had really made the way impassible, from the third story downward. These lowest flights of steps had been so badly broken, that now they gave no access to the arcade.
All that remained of them was a jumbled mass of wreckage, below the gaping hole in the third-floor hallway.
“That means,” said Stern to himself, “I’ve got to find another way down. And quick, too!”
He set about the task with a will. Exploration of several lateral corridors resulted in nothing; but at last good fortune led him to stairs that had remained comparatively uninjured. And down these he stole, pail in one hand, revolver ready in the other, listening, creeping, every sense alert.
He found himself, at length, in the shattered and dismembered wreckage of the once-famed “Marble Court.” Fallen now were the carved and gilded pillars; gone, save here or there for a fragment, the wondrous balustrade. One of the huge newel-posts at the bottom lay on the cracked floor of marble squares; the other, its metal chandelier still clinging to it, lolled drunkenly askew.
But Stern had neither time nor inclination to observe these woful changes. Instead, he pressed still forward, and, after a certain time of effort, found himself in the arcade once more.
Here the effects of the explosion were very marked. A ghastly hole opened into the subcellar below; masses of fallen ceiling blocked the way; and every pane of glass in the shop-fronts had shattered down. Smoke had blackened everything. Ashes and dirt, ad infinitum, completed the dreary picture, seen there by the still insufficient light of morning.
But Stern cared nothing for all this. It even cheered him a trifle.
“In case of a mix-up,” thought he, “there couldn’t be a better place for ambushing these infernal cannibals—for mowing them down, wholesale—for sending them skyhooting to Tophet, in bunches!”
And with a grim smile, he worked his way cautiously toward Madison Forest and the pine-tree gate.
As he drew near, his care redoubled. His grip on the revolver-butt tightened.
“They mustn’t see me—first!” said he to himself.
Into a littered wreck of an office at the right of the exit he silently crept. Here, he knew, the outer wall of the building was deeply fissured. He hoped he might be able to find some peep-hole where, unseen, he could peer out on the bestial mob.
He set his water-pail down, and on hands and knees, hardly breathing, taking infinite pains not to stir the loose rubbish on the floor, not even to crunch the fallen lumps of mortar, forward he crawled.
Yes, there was a glimmer of light through the crack in the wall. Stern silently wormed in between a corroded steel I-beam and a cracked granite block, about the edges of which the small green tendrils of a vine had laid their hold.
This way, then that, he craned his neck. And all at once, with a sharp breath, he grew rigid in horrified, eager attention.
“Great Lord!” he whispered. “What?”
Though, from the upper stories and by torchlight, he had already formed some notion of the Horde, he had in no wise been prepared for what he now was actually beholding through a screen of sumacs that grew along the wall outside.
“Why—why, this can’t be real!” thought he. “It—must be some damned hallucination. Eh? Am I awake? What the deuce!”
Paling a little, his eyes staring, mouth agape, the engineer stayed there for a long minute unable to credit his own senses. For now he, he, the only white man living in the twenty-eighth century, was witnessing the strangest sight that ever a civilized being had looked upon in the whole history of the world.
No vision of DeQuincey, no drug-born dream of Poe could equal it for grisly fascination. Frankenstein, de Maupassant’s “Horla,” all the fantastic literary monsters of the past faded to tawdry, childish bogeys beside the actual observations of Stern, the engineer, the man of science and cold fact.
“Why—what are these?” he asked himself, shuddering despite himself at the mere sight of what lay outside there in the forest. “What? Men? Animals? Neither! God help me, what—what are these things?”
CHAPTER XIX
THE UNKNOWN RACE
An almost irresistible repugnance, a compelling aversion, more of the spirit than of the flesh, instantly seized the man at sight of even the few members of the Horde which lay within his view.
Though he had been expecting to see something disgusting, something grotesque and horrible, his mind was wholly unprepared for the real hideousness of these creatures, now seen by the ever-strengthening light of day.
And slowly, as he stared, the knowledge dawned on him that here was a monstrous problem to face, far greater and more urgent than he had foreseen; here were factors not yet understood; here, the product of forces till then not even dreamed of by his scientific mind.
“I—I certainly did expect to find a small race,” thought he. “Small, and possibly misshapen, the descendants, maybe, of a few survivors of the cataclysm. But this—!”
And again, fascinated by the ghastly spectacle, he laid his eye to the chink in the wall, and looked.
A tenuous fog still drifted slowly among the forest trees, veiling the deeper recesses. Yet, near at hand, within the limited segment of vision which the engineer commanded, everything could be made out with reasonable distinctness.
Some of the Things (for so he mentally named them, knowing no better term) were squatting, lying or moving about, quite close at hand. The fire by the spring had now almost died down. It was evident that the revel had ceased, and that the Horde was settling down to rest—glutted, no doubt, with the raw and bleeding flesh of the conquered foe.
Stern could easily have poked his pistol muzzle through the crack in the wall and shot down many of them. For an instant the temptation lay strong upon him to get rid of at least a dozen or a score; but prudence restrained his hand.
“No use!” he told himself. “Nothing to be gained by that. But, once I get my proper chance at them—!”
And again, striving to observe them with the cool and calculating eye of science, he studied the shifting, confused picture out there before him.
Then he realized that the feature which, above all else, struck him as ghastly and unnatural, was the color of the Things.
“Not black, not even brown,” said he. “I thought so, last night, but daylight corrects the impression. Not red, either, or copper-colored. What color, then? For Heaven’s sake, what?”
He could hardly name it. Through the fog, it struck him as a dull slate-gray, almost a blue. He recalled that once he had seen a child’s modeling-clay, much-used and very dirty, of the same shade, which certainly had no designation in the chromatic scale. Some of the Things were darker, some a trifle l
ighter—these, no doubt, the younger ones—but they all partook of this same characteristic tint. And the skin, moreover, looked dull and sickly, rather mottled and wholly repulsive, very like that of a Mexican dog.
Like that dog’s hide, too, it was sparsely overgrown with whitish bristles. Here or there, on the bodies of some of the larger Things, bulbous warts had formed, somewhat like those on a toad’s back; and on these warts the bristles clustered thickly. Stern saw the hair, on the neck of one of these creatures, crawl and rise like a jackal’s, as a neighbor jostled him; and from the Thing’s throat issued a clicking grunt of purely animal resentment.
“Merciful Heavens! What are they?” wondered Stern, again, utterly baffled for any explanation. “What can they be?”
Another, in the group close by, attracted his attention. It was lying on its side, asleep maybe, its back directly toward the engineer. Stern clearly saw the narrow shoulders and the thin, long arms, covered with that white bristling hair.
One sprawling, spatulate, clawlike hand lay on the forest moss. The twisted little apelike legs, disproportionately short, were curled up; the feet, prehensile and with a well-marked thumb on each, twitched a little now and then. The head, enormously too big for the body, to which it was joined by a thin neck, seemed to be scantily covered with a fine, curling down, of a dirty yellowish drab color.
“What a target!” thought the engineer. “At this distance, with my .38, I could drill it without half trying!”
All at once, another of the group sat up, shoved away a burned-out torch, and yawned with a noisy, doglike whine Stern got a quick yet definite glimpse of the sharp canine teeth; he saw that the Thing’s fleshless lips and retreating chin were caked with dried blood. The tongue he saw was long and lithe and apparently rasped.
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