The Citadel of Fear

by Gertrude Barrows Bennett

  Something had happened to the room they stood in. What it was they did not pause to find out. With only a vague notion that in some way the room had become much larger, and that this enlargement, together with the jarring quiver of the floor, meant instant peril, Rhodes fairly snatched Cliona from her feet and led a rush for the porch.

  They were barely in time. As Forester, last out, crossed the threshold, a great noise of splintering wood and beams that cracked with an almost explosive uproar followed him. His companions had not paused on the porch, but Forester was a young man of that reckless sort of cool-headedness which, though it run from danger, will turn again at the very edge of safety. The porch felt solid to him. He instantly stopped there and stuck his head back through the doorway.

  The reception hall, or rather the space it had occupied, was no longer dark.

  He had a brief glimpse of a huge open space, billowing with clouds of lime dust and black smoke, shot through with ruddy flames. The floor level had apparently dropped some distance and was no longer level at all, but a seep, uneven slant descending to--what?

  From the rolling clouds a fierce, white focus of light shot blinding rays. The smoke filled his eyes with acrid tears, and as he raised his hand to dash them away, crashing doom shot down from above.

  The end of a flying beam just missed his face, and he withdrew it hastily.

  "By George," he exclaimed, "the whole darn house is caving!" and thrust his head forward for further news.

  Then a heavy hand jerked him away from the door and off the porch.

  "Come away from there, you fool!" yelled MacClellan in his ear. "That wall will go in a minute. Don't you know enough to stand from under when a house falls in? Now you beat it over to Undine and turn in a fire alarm. Phone Deering at--no, phone the Lillybank station that's nearer. Tell 'em to chase a patrol load out here quick. Don't wait for them nor the department. Get hold of any men you can pick up in Undine--and axes--and back here on the jump. Get me?"

  "You bet!" came the young man's informal acknowledgment, and he was gone into the darkness. He intended to make his absence from this fascinating scene as brief as was humanly possible.

  MacClellan turned to his companions, only to find himself alone. By the light of a ruddy, sullen glare newly sprung into being, he glanced from side to side, but none of the three was visible. The wall before him had not fallen, but through the open doorway smoke poured, only to be beaten back by the wind. Behind it glowed a redness like the very heart of hell.

  Never in his life, save once, had he seen a fire develop with such amazing celerity. That other conflagration, though, had occurred in a sash and door factory, and had been encouraged by the bursting of a fifty-gallon tank of varnish. One does not expect a stone dwelling house to flare up into easy flame. The roar of falling d�bris warned him that other walls were proving less stanch than the one which faced him, but the collapse had begun too early to have been caused by the fire.

  The entire catastrophe was as incomprehensible as sudden.

  MacClellan dashed off, searching at hazard for the three reckless ones who had come in the car. He had called himself a conscientious man, and it happened to be true. The stout detective felt personally responsible that "his party" did nothing rash in an effort to rescue that wild Irishman, O'Hara, who most likely lay dead now in the flaming ruins.

  He had half encircled the house before he found any trace of those he sought. To his increased surprise, not a single outer wall had fallen, though the windows, heat-broken now and belching smoke, betrayed what a stone-sheathed welter of flame they enclosed.

  He knew nothing of the reconstruction that had metamorphosed the Jerrard's time-honored residence to so strange an inward form. As a matter of fact, the rear walls of the reception hall and two rooms on either side of it were contiguous to the shaft's inner sheathing, and when the piles beneath finally gave way, that entire wing of the house, including the shaft's side, collapsed, leaving only the outer wall to stand.

  The two other sides of the shaft overhanging the marsh were not long in following, but the fourth, the solid wall in which was the doorway where Colin fought, did not fall. It abutted upon a one-story wing built on as an addition and which covered no portion of the cellar. The doorway led through a passage to a flight of stone stairs, opening in turn upon a suite of rooms reserved by the Lord of Fear for his own use.

  When MacClellan came to an outstanding wing whose windows were dark and cool, and where a low veranda bespoke possible entrance, he had no reason to think this what it was--a point of greater though different danger than that from which he had peremptorily snatched Forester.

  Seeing the figure of a man just disappearing into the verandas shadow, he dashed hurriedly after him, still bent on dissuasion. It was no use to shout. His voice wouldn't have carried ten feet in that uproar. Once inside he snapped on his borrowed flash at the same instant that someone else struck a match.

  * * * * *

  The long, narrow room he had come into was fogged at one end with thin smoke, but MacClellan saw at least two figures immediately ahead of him, one of them holding a match above its head and peering anxiously about.

  Cliona had again played leader and with such an instinct for directness as had carried her this time clean out of touch with her anxious "support." Just as MacClellan reached them his flash disclosed another pair of wide doors standing open in the room's far wall.

  Instantly both Biornson and the lawyer fairly hurled themselves toward that black aperture, and again the conscientious one wan forced to follow or give up his mission. He followed.

  A stone stair led steeply down, ending at a blank white wall. The first two plunged down, their pursuer involuntarily lending the air of his light-ray to their descent, but at the blank wall they turned to the left and abruptly disappeared.

  The stairway was almost free from smoke, but a wave of heat came up from it. It occurred to MacClellan that he was quite possibly about to immolate himself at the altar of other people's recklessness. He hesitated.

  The air shook to a heavy concussion. It came from beyond the stair-foot and sounded as though a bomb had exploded.

  All three of his party were probably down there.

  MacClellan swore and ran down the stairs three steps at a time. He hardly expected to come up them again. The whole house would go in a minute, and the recklessness of people, throwing away their lives in hopeless attempts at rescue, was very trying indeed to Mr. MacClellan!

  When, a minute or so earlier, Rhodes and Biornson had arrived at the stair foot, they discovered that a wide passage opened there and some five yards along it there seemed to be a large rectangular opening in its wall, through which beat a light so white and fierce that even its reflection vas dazzling. Dark forms moved against it.

  The newcomers had hoped for little but to drag Cliona back to safety. But on racing along the passage they found not one but two women at the end of it, and in the center of that brilliant rectangle, a huge, wild figure of a man that thrust and struck outward desperately.

  What he was striking at, however, they could not make out till they were fairly abreast of the glaring doorway. The opening was broad and difficult for one man, however powerful, to guard against such assailants as were besieging it. Even as Rhodes arrived, somewhat in advance, a head came thrusting through beside Colin and under his guard.

  It was a frightful thing, that head, slimy, and dripping, large as a lion's and hideous as a gargoyle's. It thrust through with a writhing motion, at the end of a neck unthinkably long and snakelike.

  The once skeptical lawyer didn't stop to consider whether what he saw was possible. Again both barrels of the duck gun spoke together. That explosion was what MacClellan had heard, reechoed by the walls of the passage, and it announced quietus for at least one more of Kennedy's "recreations." Hard dying they no doubt were, but the charge of a double-barreled shotgun at a range of an inch or so is a mighty queller.

  The neck, with what was le
ft of the head trailing, slid laxly back.

  Colin thought the passage was falling behind him and turned, but as Biornson shouted "All right! We're with you!" he lunged forward again, content to accept reenforcements without stopping to ask why or whence.

  Biornson sprang to one side of him and Rhodes to the other. Shoulder to shoulder they stood across the doorway.

  The light was blinding and the heat terrific. Half-seeing, they shot and hacked at swimming enemies whose diverse loathsomeness was only equaled by their ferocious determination to pass that doorway.

  * * * * *

  Beyond a twelve-foot-wide area of hot, black water, where the recreations thronged, towered a heap of blazing d�bris that sent its roaring flames and smoke to the very height of the "fortress", sucked up by the rushing wind. At the center of the heap was that fierce white focus of light which Forester had observed and which it seemed no smoke could obscure.

  Below that again--it was terribly hard to see anything--but Rhodes thought a darkness was there, as if in falling the beams and walls had made a sort of recess of cavern beneath themselves.

  And even in the midst of battle the young lawyer became gradually conscious of a dread worse a hundred times than the facing of all the racing beastliness they fought.

  The fancy came on him that something hid in the sheltered darkness--something living, but that had no right to life--something vague in his thought as a smoke cloud, and definite in terror as the 'bogies' of childhood days.

  Biornson shared the impression, but with a difference. He knew that the darkness was a recess, and the recess a lair, and that what peered forth from it lived without the grace of flesh and blood which made even its distorted creatures endurable to think of. But if there is an evil which is not only of the flesh, so also there is a courage. Knowing, he fought on.

  Ammunition quickly exhausted, the weapons of Colin's allies were soon less efficient than his spade. There was little room to swing a gun-stock, but now the attack began to seem less vigorous. The black water steamed hot vapor. One or two of the monsters that had been neither shot nor smitten disappeared to rise no more.

  With scorching face, Rhodes thanked God for the heat, if it were weakening the enemy more than himself. Probably it was because they were in the water, and the doorway on a higher level. No, that was absurd. Heat rose upward.

  The shotgun's stock landed fairly on the forehead of a neckless, flat-faced abnormality, with the tusks of a wild boar and a frontal carapace that should have been impregnable.

  It crushed in with ridiculous ease, and the stock flew in a dozen pieces.

  Rhodes laughed. He had not struck very hard. The heat was terrific. It had softened the beast's skull, no doubt, and the walnut stock of his gun.

  With the barrels he foiled a clever, monkey-armed fiend, reaching for Colin's ankle to pull him down. The barrels, too, bent in shattering that arm.

  The heat, of course. How lucky it was that he himself did not feel at all weakened, any more than his companions!

  There was a glorious wind blowing from somewhere--a hot wind, but laden with vigor. Rhodes was conscious of a kind of enormous vitality in himself--as if he were larger than himself--much larger and stronger. His brain swam dizzily, but his vigor was tremendous--endless. Fire, fire everywhere, and he in the midst of it--part of it--elemental, deathless fire. Demons swam in it, drowning, and he struck at them joyously with a sword of fire --

  But at this point, regrettable to state, the testimony of Anthony Rhodes becomes valueless, because he was later quite unable to remember what happened next.

  In fact, since an unbaised account is desirable, it seems best to fall back upon that unprejudiced, if bewildered witness, Detective MacClellan. He arrived on the scene only a few moments after Rhodes and Biornson, and was present at the final attack, and that he adhered to facts in reporting the affair next day to his chief does him great credit. A less conscientious man would have saved his reputation for veracity by lying.

  "That was one scrap that had me guessing, chief. I didn't know what was happening, nor what had happened, nor what was due to happen. These three guys stood across the door beating and shooting at something beyond. It was hotter than a river tug's stoke-hole and the light was awful.

  "I tried to squeeze in the doorway but there wasn't room, and those two women were there, and I couldn't get 'em to come away. I'd have gone back afterward, but I wanted to get them out of the house where they weren't doing a bit of good. No use. I might as well have been a phonograph five miles off playing 'The End of a Perfect Day.'

  "Then all of a sudden something come flying through the whiteness beyond the door like a shadow against it, and next minute this guy O'Hara smashed over backward with a big black thing on him that looks to me like a big monkey. He says afterward it's a live marble statue. Maybe he's bughouse and maybe I am. I dunno. There might as well be live statues as some of the other nightmares I saw afterward. Well, anyway, Mr. Rhodes had phoned something about a big monkey out there, so I thought it was that.

  "And here they are, this thing and O'Hara, rolling all over the floor together, and me hopping around the outside trying to keep the women out of it, and wanting to shoot, but scared I'd hit the wrong one.

  "Then Mr. Rhodes and this Biornson party wheels around to see what's going on, and right away there comes scrambling through that doorway an aggregation of--of--what-is-its--eight-legged, four-legged, three-legged, and no-legged that well, when I try to think of 'em I just can't seem to get my mind down to details, chief. But honestly, Ringling Brothers would have paid a million dollars just for their pictures to slap on walls.

  "O'Hara says they were white-colored, and the monkey was white, too, and so it couldn't have been the monkey that jumped him, because what jumped him was black. But the whole bunch was so messed up with mud they might have been pink or baby blue underneath for all anybody could tell. They came plunging through, and Rhodes and Biornson went down under 'em. I was clean at the passage, understand, trying to keep those two women out of it, and we just missed being tramped under.

  "For a fact the brutes didn't pay any attention at all to us. They weren't fighting mad, they were fear mad, with the fire behind 'em. I don't know how many there was. There might have been a dozen or there might have bin more. The last one--it was a thing like a kind of spidery cat, and big as any tiger--it jumped clean over the fellows on the floor and the rash was over, but I could hear the brutes yelling and tearing each other up the stairs, even over all the other racket.

  "I'd emptied my gun as they went, but it might just as well have been a bean-shooter for all the good it did.

  "I didn't reckon to see any of those three guys that had been tramped under get up again. But when I looked, darned if the Irishman and whatever it was he was scrapping with weren't tumbling around just the same as before. Too busy to know they'd been run over, I guess. And this Biornson, who, I must say, is one of the gamest old guys I ever met he was just scrambling up. But Rhodes don't get up, because he's got a busted leg.

  "Biornson, he looks around kind of wild, with the blood streaming over his face, and then darned if the old white-head don't jump into that fight to a finish between O'Hara and--and whatever it was.

  "I'd shoved a fresh clip in my gun, and was willing enough to take a shot, but--say, chief, if you'd seen that scrap you'd know why I hated to mix in personally. If I'd see a man scrapping with a full-grown gorilla--and maybe that's what it was--I'd pot the gorilla if I could, but I'll be darned if I'd do what Biornson did.

  "As I says before, he jumps right in and grabs the thing around the neck, tryin' to jerk its head back. He lasts about five seconds and then got his. At the time I couldn't tell just what happened, but it seems the brute had its teeth comfortably clamped in O'Hara's shoulder and didn't take kindly to interference. It let go and its head came back all right, and the same minute it gave Biornson a left-handed side-swipe that landed the poor guy about ten feet away.

  "Then
it got back to business, but just that few seconds had given O'Hara his chance. And I want to say, chief, that anything I ever said against that big Irish mick I take back here and now. Fight! Say, I wish you'd seen that scrap! And in the time its head was up he got one hand on its throat and next minute the other.

  "And--say, chief, come to think of it, you couldn't strangle a stone statue, even if it was alive, now could you?"

  "Mac," said the chief very solemnly, "I am listening to a story on which comment would be--er--cruel. Proceed."

  "All right, don't believe me then." MacClellan's tone was more dogged than injured. "I knew you wouldn't, anyway, but I have to make my report, and this thing happened just like I'm telling it. Didn't I say at the start I thought it was a gorilla? Though, I'll be darned if anybody even saw a gorilla with a face like--well, anyway, it could be choked, for O'Hara did it.

  "That was when I got my first good look at the thing and--say, I don't like to think about it even now. Makes me kind of sick. No use. You'd have had to see it to understand. I could have plugged it easy then. But I give you my word I forgot I had a gun in my hand. I just stood there staring. I wanted to run, and I couldn't. Not with those women behind me.

  "I'd had my arms out--so--keepin' 'em back. Isn't it the devil the way women are? If they've got a man in a scrap and think he's getting the worst of it, they'll rush in and never think twice about getting hurt --"

  "Back to your animated statuary, Mac. You're wandering."

  "Well, these two had stopped trying to get past me. They were struck still, just like me. He--he strangled it with his hands--and--and--that's enough said. If it was bad living, it was worse dying. I've seen a few messy scraps in my time, but this was different. Can't tell you. Makes me side to think of it.

  "I was never so grateful to anybody in all my life as I was to O'Hara when he straightened up all of a sudden and dragged that--thing--up with him, and pitched it out of the door. He didn't pitch it any little ways, either. It was near as big as him, but he just took it neck and ankles, give it a couple of swings, and sent it flyin' across about twelve feet of water right into the heart of the fire. I give you my word, the flames flared up like he'd slung a bag of gunpowder into them.