The Citadel of Fear

by Gertrude Barrows Bennett

  "And they won't be easily killed. They die hard at best, and besides, man is lord of the beasts only because he is more intelligent. These will have the intellect of man himself behind them. Had I directed that poor brute in June there would have been no trail of its blood to set folks gaping.

  "Have you seen the bungalow today? It is rather fortunate that you weren't in it last night, for, after considerable thought, I have decided to use you in a much better way than by killing you. I had seen a danger in that eternal curiosity of yours, and thought best to get rid of you quickly, and in your own house rather than here.

  "But, having you alive in my very hands, there is another temptation which I find quite irresistible. But if you had been in the bungalow--wasn't the wreckage there pretty thorough? My newer servants are very strong and easily directed. Do you wonder that I call myself the Lord of Fear and say that I will some day rule the world?"

  "You'll rule the inside of a condemned cell," said Colin coldly. "You've done nothing that I can perceive but make a warlock of yourself, and at that no self-respecting man would be afraid of you! You're not the first to trade your soul to the old boy for promise of the world and all, but of them that ever did it, you do look the most foolish! Take My advice, little man. Smash the black one there before it's too late, clean out your swamp with a shotgun, and start fresh! Free my arms and I'll find strength to help you to the doing of it. Is it a bargain?"

  * * * * *

  The self-styled Lord of Fear glared pure exasperation. "You will help me," he snarled, "but not in, that way! Do you see my hand?"

  He thrust it under Colin's nose.

  "I see an uncommonly ugly glove. From one of your pets' paws by the talons of it."

  "Glove!" The man pushed up his cuff to disclose the wrist. "Look closer, fool! An accident did that to me--a moment's carelessness when I was attempting my first recreation. Do you remember those white hounds you fought in the pass? I'll never forget the minute when I first discovered their origin! You'll help me, I say, and that great lumbering body of yours will be put to good use at last!

  "I'll dissolve your living flesh and remold it to such a shape as will frighten even your brothers of the swamp! And after that you'll kill and destroy at my bidding! Yes, though I sent you against a friend, or those of your own flesh and blood, you'll hate and rend and kill--and die, ravening at last, in some midnight battle fought for my sake and glory!"

  "No," said Colin. Had that beast-hand closed on his heart he could have hardly been more sickeningly shocked. Somehow the final inference of all Kennedy's wild talk and vague threats had not come home to him until this moment.

  They had been talking of the transmutation of beasts into other beasts--of the lower order of creatures, for which even the kindest-hearted of men feels a sympathy rather patronizing. Colin had thought to be killed--fed to the monsters of the swamp, perhaps, a fate bad enough. But this! And yet Colin's voice, though still hoarse, sounded very sane and cool. "No. You can't do that with me, Mr. Kennedy."

  "Why not, pray? One of the rabbits that went to make those stalking terrors yonder could be no more in my power than you are!"

  "No," said Colin again. "A rabbit--maybe. Yourself--I don't doubt. 'Twould take little at best to bring the beast out of you, Mr. Kennedy. But a real man--no!"

  "You flatter yourself! Again--why not?"

  "It won't be allowed, that's all. If you were really the clever devil you think you are you'd know that! Ask Nacoc-Yaotl there! By the eye of him he's had a wider experience than yourself, and he knows why not!"

  Before Kennedy could reply there came a slow, shuffling sound from somewhere outside the cellar. It stopped, and that one door in the wall was pushed open. Something--it was hard to see what--bulked palely in the dark beyond.

  Then it came on slowly, shufflingly. It came into the light and across the floor, and it laid the burden it had half-dragged, half-earned hither in the space between Kennedy and his prisoner.

  Of all the horrors that Colin had met since entering the gates at dusk only one had really shaken him to the soul. Not the real gatekeeper. coiled around his chest had been so bad as that first moment when he thought the drooped oval of its head was Marco's face.

  And just so, not the sight of goblins, nor the black, brooding genius of goblins, nor even the beast-paw that Kennedy bore for a hand--not one of these things had moved him as did the sight of Marco's body, dragged in and laid gravely at his feet by Genghis Khan.

  If Khan were not a real ape, he had all the appearance of one. He had the short bowed legs of a simian, the thin arms, tremendous chest and almost neckless head--but, above all, he had the infinite simian sadness in his face.

  No human accuser could have equaled the solemnity of Khan's manner in that act, which he performed as one who does the last, sad duty by a departed friend.

  Then, with startling abruptness, he turned a back somersault, landed on Nacoc-Yaotl's sacred dais and crouched there, chattering and nursing the broken arm he had probably forgotten when he attempted that acrobatic feat.

  The grotesquery of it was the final straw for Colin.

  Marco had lain heavy enough on his conscience. Having learned the full history, and become cognizant of the monstrous crimes toward which Kennedy's "work", made possible by Marco, was directed, Colin might reasonably have felt the burden lighter. But so far this view had not struck him. For twenty-four hours he had agonized in spirit over the killing of this weakling, and those hours had left their mark.

  To be presented with his victim's corpse by a white monkey-thing that turned somersaults afterward was the strain too much. What strength had been left him fell away like a dropping tide. Dimly he heard a voice say: "Marco--and dead! Well, by George, I thought he and the girl--had run off together! I wonder what's become of her, then?" But Kennedy's further speculations went unheard, for his prisoner had fainted.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  To Undine

  Table of Contents

  Far toward the heart of the city a car sped silently over the asphalt, with a greatly perturbed young man at the wheel. The car was Cliona's, and this late expedition was Cliona's, and Cliona herself was in it.

  By the time she and Svend Biornson had finished, comparing notes and jumping at the maddest conclusions Rhodes had ever heard spoken in sober earnest, that young man was in a semidazed condition. He scarcely retained spirit to protest when Cliona commanded him to run out her car, to place in it his shotgun and what other firearms were in the house, and prepare instantly for a sortie in force against the house of a man he had never heard of twenty-four hours earlier.

  His suggestion of "Police!" was met with a scorn to take his breath away. But here, having learned that a man high in the city detective force was already working on the case, Biornson seconded Rhodes' demand that the law be called into alliance.

  "No need to explain fully," he asserted. "Keep the story within their comprehension. The bungalow affair is a lever to move them which I should have lacked, working alone. Begin by telephoning this MacClellan that O'Hara had reason to suspect the owner of the Undine place of keeping dangerous wild beasts in an insecure manner, and went there this afternoon or evening, alone. Tell him that O'Hara has not returned here, though he agreed to do so, and that a man--myself, of course--has brought you information about Kennedy, alias Reed, which proves him a very dangerous criminal.

  "Tell him that you and I will run downtown and join him, that I will then make known to him facts that justify Kennedy's instant arrest, and that for good reasons he had best have a detail of several men ready to go out there with us.

  "I believe the charge that Kennedy kidnaped my daughter is serious enough. We shan't need to venture on the more--er--improbable part. What we shall certainly find in his house will speak for itself, I think. There might be delay, in swearing out a warrant on the kidnaping charge, so in phoning, be sure and emphasize the fact we believe O'Hara's life to be in serious peril."

  Somewhat reluct
antly, Rhodes undertook the task set for him. His disbelief in Biornson's story as a whole was not voluntary. He couldn't believe it. But on the other hand, that story in combination with Colin's strange experience with the giant ape, had brought him to a kind of incredulous uneasiness of mind about it all, and to have the place investigated by lawful authorities would cut the knot of doubt in a very satisfactory manner.

  He called the Detective Bureau at City Hall, and by luck caught MacClellan just as the latter was about to "lay off" and go home early. The life of a city detective being both strenuous and irregular, he accomplished this feat about one day in thirty, and, being human as well as stolid, he sometimes got very tired. He was tired tonight.

  Rhodes, of course, could not know this. Neither could he know that, in the light of their last parting, sympathetic concern for Colin O'Hara's life or limb had no share in MacClellan's feeling for him.

  But Rhodes did know that the ensuing conversation was so highly unsatisfactory that he suddenly hung up the receiver very forcibly, and turned a flushed, indignant face to the other two.

  "He says that Colin told him to drop the bungalow case, and when he reported, his chief took him off the assignment. He says that if you will come down and make your complaint in person, Mr. Biornson, the matter of Reed will be investigated, but they cannot make a night-raid on a respectable householder unless the person demanding it presents convincing proof and good credentials of his own.

  "He seems to ignore the fact that I myself am a respectable householder. He said--he was extremely insolent!" snapped the young lawyer, breaking off into sheer indignation. "He deserves to be reported to his chief. I think I'll do that little thing, too!"

  He reached again for the receiver, but Cliona caught his hand and fairly dragged him away from the telephone.

  "Tony, my Colin has gone to Undine and you waste time arguing with the polikce! I know he's gone there. Didn't Mr. Biornson see him in Carpentier and see him put the car to the Undine road at a speed to frighten one? I've known it all evening--he's gone there in search of her, and from what she said 'tis sure as the world that she's traveled the same way in search of him--and it's there we'll find both of them, so be they've not been murdered before this!"

  And so, almost before he knew it, Rhodes found himself, his wife, and a stranger in the car, bound, apparently, on the armed invasion of another utter stranger's residence.

  "Hurry!" came her voice in his ear.

  "We're making enough speed to cost me a fortune in fines, if every policeman we've passed has taken our number!"

  "What's that in life or death! Mr. Biornson, have you a plan for us when we reach there?"

  "No," he said simply. "If what I know might be is true, then our going alone in this manner is mere suicide. And yet--that detective's attitude was rather indicative. We have no hours to waste. How could we convince the police in time, or where else could we raise a force of men tonight?"

  CHAPTER XXVII

  Strange Victim--Stranger Conqueror

  Table of Contents

  Though invisible from the road, in the gate lodge its "keeper" still pulsed with a faint, excited glowing. The flat length lay in a loose coil, the head, with its specklike eyes, at rest on the threshold of the lodge.

  Suddenly the head lifted. With a swaying motion it rose upward some five feet, to droop and poise, a luminous oval, as when Colin had first seen it to his sorrow. By some sense, whether of hearing or vibration, it had become aware that the gate was softly opening, that someone had entered and was advancing along the drive.

  Into the keeper's range of vision--if it had vision and were not guided by some other unknown sense--there flitted a dark figure. The obscuring mists of earlier evening had been blown away by the gusty night-wind. Had the figure turned it would have seen clearer than had Colin that floating, menacing oval in the lodge. But it did not turn, and when the keeper shot out in pursuit the rustle of straightening coils was lost in the swish and clash of wind-torn bare branches.

  Unwarned, the dark figure hurried on up the drive, and like a writhing white flame the keeper followed. In a moment it was almost upon the heels of its second quarry.

  There came one of those freakish gusts, like the breath of an invisible giant. It crashed through the branches and swept the black cloak out like a sail.

  Something came whistling down through the air with the speed of a flung spear.

  The keeper's intended quarry hurried on, but the keeper itself no longer followed. Writhing, lashing, a fury of pulsing fire, it whipped its length again and again about the enemy that had pinned it to the path. But the enemy was only an old dry branch, broken off by the wind and hurled endwise. Let the empaled creature fight as it would, a dry branch is to be neither terrorized nor slain.

  In a frantic tangle of flashing coils and snapping, splintering twigs, the gatekeeper remained wholly engaged with its conqueror.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  Rival Claimants

  Table of Contents

  Colin O'Hara had a vision.

  He thought that again he lay stretched on the "workroom" floor. Though his eyes were closed, he thought that the lids grew transparent, and by this phenomenon a great clarity of sight came upon him, so that all about him was thrice clear, and without stirring a muscle he could see every part of his surroundings.

  He and Marco lay side by side, very stiff and straight. This seemed just, though unpleasant. When Kennedy came with Genghis Kahn to roll and drag him away, had he been able to speak he would have protested. They had no sense of what was fitting! Or perhaps they were ignorant of who had slain the poor weakling.

  With his one good arm Khan was trying to lift him now. They had dragged him to the golden font, and he noted with no particular interest that the stained apron no longer draped the third cougar's head. Then he perceived that Kennedy was wearing it, and was also trying to fit a glove, yellow and shining as soft flexible gold, over his right hand, but the taloned white paw that had been his left retained no skill.

  At last he motioned the great ape to aid him, and Khan did. The ape's hand was clever enough, for all the fur on the back of it. Did that prove the created beast its creator's superior? Colin pondered this deeply, but ere he could reach a satisfactory conclusion they were at him again.

  Kennedy began untying the knots of his bonds, but left off suddenly.

  "No," muttered he. "To be on the safe side I shall have to anesthetize before stripping him. The faint may be only a sham. Let him stay tied for a while."

  This amused Colin, who knew himself to be dead. How cautious the little man was!

  Now Khan was lifting at him once more. This time the master helped, and though his strength was comparatively feeble, the two of them managed to raise Colin to the font's level. Tumbled over the edge, he subsided into the font and lay there uncomfortably. The thing wasn't long enough. His neck was doubled at a painful angle. Marco's body now would have fitted much better. If they must have a corpse to the font, why couldn't they have chosen Marco's?

  Then--for though his face was below the basin's edge, he could see as well as ever what went on he perceived that Kennedy was taking some jars, some boxes, and a small flask from the depths of those golden vessels by the wall. He came presently and set them out on a kind of shelf that extended from the font.

  The flask he took in his hand, and it was a thing of gold and great value; and carved all over with writhing, lizard-like forms. The stopper of it, which was glass or crystal, fitted tightly, and Kennedy had some trouble in removing it. But it came out at last.

  He sniffed, as if testing the freshness of the stuff it contained, smiled in unpleasant satisfaction, replaced the stopper and set it down again. Then he stooped, and from the floor behind the font, lifted a more commonplace receptacle: a large, glass bottle, half-filled with some kind of colorless fluid.

  After that there were two or three things done, but exactly what they were Colin was not sure, because the strange sight that had
come on him blurred for a time and all was confused, shadowy, and not to be remembered. Something was put over his face, he thought, and after a time taken away again. A sickish-sweet odor oppressed him, hands fumbled about his body, and somewhere, very far away, a bell rang constantly.

  Then, clearer if possible than before, the sight returned.

  There was Kennedy still, but he had done with the bottle, and now he was for opening one of the small olden jars. As he did it he looked at Colin, and behind his beard the thin red lips grew to a smile that was ugly as a toad's without its honesty.

  Suddenly, with no moment's interim of thought or doubt, Colin knew the meaning and the end of these preparations. And he knew that he was not dead, but only helpless, and that the slitlike, watchful eyes behind those round glasses were no longer Kennedy's, but the eyes of Nacoc-Yaotl, maker of goblins!

  With that, he who had been Archer Kennedy faded to nothing, and in his place stood the naked evil that had squatted on the dais.

  Smiling, it leaned to pass treacherous, caressing fingers across the victim's face.

  Colin's spirit shivered, but all that was great in him rose to fierce rebellion. Never! Never! What claim had that dark vileness upon him!

  But he could not even speak to protest, for his body slept. Then somewhere a low, clear voice was sounding.

  "Wait!" it said softly. "Nacoc-Yaotl, you who were once my brother, wait! Lest you break the law that must not be broken, and destroy yourself with the world!"

  Colin had thought the voice that of his Dusk Lady, but surely the Demon had never been a brother of hers!

  His attention, which had been fixed on what hung over him, widened.

  The speaker, he discovered, was a tall youth, very slender, who stood before the font facing Nacoc-Yaotl across Colin's body. In one hand he grasped a staff, its serpent-head curving out of a circlet of quail-feathers. Of the speckled quail-feathers was his cloak, and the round shield he bore on his left arm was rimmed with them.