Delphi Works of Robert E. Howard (Illustrated) (Series Four)

by Robert E. Howard

  “You spoke truth, sahib,” the Sikh whispered. “How the call came in the likeness of your voice, I do not know. But I know, now, what slew Reynolds, sahib. After all these years — but they never forget, though the broad sea lies between. Beware! The fiend may return. The gold — the gold was cursed — I told Reynolds, sahib — had he heeded me, he—”

  A sudden welling of blood drowned the laboring voice. Under Brill’s hand the great body stiffened and twisted in a brief convulsion, then went limp.

  Groping on the floor, the scientist failed to find the flashlight. He groped along the wall, found the switch and flooded the cottage with light.

  Turning back into the room, a stifled cry escaped his lips.

  Jugra Singh lay slumped near the bed; huddled in a corner was Yut Wuen, his yellow hands, palms upturned, limp on the floor at his sides; Ali sprawled face down in the middle of the room. All three were dead. Throats, breasts and bellies were slashed to ribbons; their garments were in strips, and among the rags hung bloody tatters of flesh. Yut Wuen had been disemboweled, and the gaping wounds of the others were like those of sheep after a mountain lion has ranged through the fold.

  A blackjack still stuck in Yut Wuen’s belt. Ali’s dead hand clutched a knife, but it was unstained. Death had struck them before they could use their weapons. But on the floor near Jugra Singh lay a great curved dagger, and it was red to the hilt. Bloody stains led across the floor and up over the window sill. Brill found the flash, snapped it on, and leaned out the window, playing the white beam on the ground outside. Dark, irregular splotches showed, leading off toward the dense woods.

  With the flash in one hand and the Sikh’s knife in the other, Brill followed those stains. At the edge of the trees he came upon a track, and the short hairs lifted on his scalp. A foot, planted in a pool of blood, had limned its imprint in crimson on the hard loam. And the foot, bare and splay, was that of a human.

  That print upset vague theories of a feline or anthropoid killer, stirred nebulous thoughts at the back of his mind — dim and awful race memories of semi-human ghouls, of werewolves who walked like men and slew like beasts.

  A low groan brought him to a halt, his flesh crawling. Under the black trees in the silence, that sound was pregnant with grisly probabilities. Gripping the knife firmly, he flashed the beam ahead of him. The thin light wavered, then focused on a black heap that was not part of the forest.

  Brill bent over the figure and stood transfixed, transported back across the years and across the world to another wilder, grimmer woodland.

  It was a naked black man that lay at his feet, his glassy eyes reflecting the waning light. His legs were short, bowed and gnarled, his arms long, his shoulders abnormally broad, his shaven head set plump between them without visible neck. That head was hideously malformed; the forehead projected almost into a peek, while the back of the skull was unnaturally flattened. White paint banded face, shoulders and breast. But it was at the creature’s fingers which Brill looked longest. At first glance they seemed monstrously deformed. Then he saw that those hands were furnished with long curving steel hooks, sharp- pointed, and keen-edged on the concave side. To each finger one of these barbarous weapons was made fast, and those fingers, like the hooks clotted and smeared with blood, twitched exactly as the talons of a leopard twitch.

  A light step brought him round. His dimming light played on a tall figure, and Brill mumbled: “John Galt!” in no great surprise. He was so numbed by bewilderment that the strangeness of the man’s presence did not occur to him.

  “What in God’s name is this?” demanded the tall explorer, taking the light from Brill’s hand and directing it on the mangled shape. “What in Heaven’s name is that?”

  “A black nightmare from Africa!” Brill found his tongue at last, and speech came in a rush. “An Egbo! A leopard man! I learned of them when I was on the West Coast. He belongs to a native cult which worships the leopard. They take a male infant and subject his head to pressure, to make it deformed; and he is brought up to believe that the spirit of a leopard inhabits his body. He does the bidding of the cult’s head, which mainly consists of executing the enemies of the cult. He is, in effect, a human leopard!”

  “What’s he doing here?” demanded Galt, in seeming incredulity.

  “God knows. But he must have been the thing that killed Reynolds. He killed Reynolds’ three servants tonight — would have killed me, too, I suppose, but Jugra Singh wounded him, and he evidently dragged himself away like a wild beast to die in the jungle—”

  Galt seemed curiously uninterested in Brill’s stammering narrative.

  “Sure he’s dead?” he muttered, bending closer to flash the light into the hideous face. The illumination was dim; the battery was swiftly burning out.

  As Brill was about to speak, the painted face was briefly convulsed. The glazed eyes gleamed as with a last surge of life. A clawed hand stirred, lifted feebly up toward Galt. A few gutturals seeped through the blubbery lips; the fingers writhed weakly, slipped from the iron talons, which the black man lifted, as if trying to hand them to Galt. Then he shuddered, sank back and lay still. He had been stabbed under the heart, and only a beast-like vitality had carried him so far.

  Galt straightened and faced Brill, turning the light on him. A beat of silence cut between them, in which the atmosphere was electric with tension.

  “You understand the Ekoi dialect?” It was more an assertion than a question.

  Brill’s heart was pounding, a new bewilderment vying with a rising wrath. “Yes,” he answered shortly.

  “What did that fool say?” softly asked Galt.

  Brill set his teeth and stubbornly took the plunge reason cried out against. “He said,” he replied between his teeth, “‘Master, take my tools to the tribe, and tell them of our vengeance; they will give you what I promised you.’”

  Even as he ground out the words, his powerful body crouched, his nerves taut for the grapple. But before he could move, the black muzzle of an automatic trained on his belly.

  “Too bad you had to understand that death-bed confession, Brill,” said Galt, coolly. “I don’t want to kill you. I’ve kept blood off my hands so far through this affair. Listen, you’re a poor man, like most scientists — how’d you consider cutting in on a fortune? Wouldn’t that be preferable to getting a slug through your guts and being planted alongside those yellow- bellied stiffs down in Reynolds’ shack for them to get the blame?”

  “No man wants to die,” answered Brill, his gaze fixed on the light in Galt’s hand — the glow which was rapidly turning redder and dimmer.

  “Good!” snapped Galt. “I’ll give you the low down. Reynolds got his money in the Kameroons — stole gold from the Ekoi, which they had stored in the ju-ju hut; he killed a priest of the Egbo cult in getting away. Jugra Singh was with him. But they didn’t get all the gold. And after that the Ekoi took good care to guard it so nobody could steal what was left.

  “I knew this fellow, Guja, when I was in Africa. I was after the Ekoi gold then, but I never had a chance to locate it. I met Guja a few months ago, again. He’d been exiled from his tribe for some crime, had wandered to the Coast and been picked up with some more natives who were brought to America for exhibition in the World’s Fair.

  “Guja was mad to get back to his people, and he spilled the whole story of the gold. Told me that if he could kill Reynolds, his tribe would forgive him. He knew that Reynolds was somewhere in America, but he was helpless as a child to find him. I offered to arrange his meeting with the gold-thief, if Guja would agree to give me some of the gold his tribe hoarded.

  “He swore by the skull of the great leopard. I brought him secretly into these hills, and hid him up yonder in a shack the existence of which nobody suspects. It took me a wretched time to teach him just what he was to do — he’d no more brains than an ape. Night after night I went through the thing with him, until he learned the procedure: to watch in the hills until he saw a light flash in Reynolds
’ shack. Then steal down there, jerk the switch — and kill. These leopard men can see like cats at night.

  “I called Reynolds up myself; it wasn’t hard to imitate your voice. I used to do impersonations in vaudeville. While Guja was tearing the life out of Reynolds, I was dining at a well-known night club, in full sight of all.

  “I came here tonight to smuggle him out of the country. But his blood- lust must have betrayed him. When he saw the light flash on in the cottage again, it must have started a train of associations that led him once more to the cottage, to kill whoever he found there. I saw the tag-end of the business — saw him stagger away from the shack, and then you follow him.

  “Now then, I’ve shot the works. Nobody knows I’m mixed up in this business, but you. Will you keep your mouth shut and take a share of the Ekoi gold?”

  The glow went out. In the sudden darkness, Brill, his pent-up feelings exploding at last, yelled: “Damn you, no! You murdering dog!” and sprang aside. The pistol cracked, an orange jet sliced the darkness, and the bullet fanned Brill’s ear as he threw the heavy knife blindly. He heard it rattle futilely through the bushes, and stood frozen with the realization that he had lost his desperate gamble.

  But even as he braced himself against the tearing impact of the bullet he expected, a sudden beam drilled the blackness, illuminating the convulsed features of John Galt.

  “Don’t move, Galt; I’ve got the drop on you.”

  It was the voice of Buckley. With a snarl, Galt took as desperate a chance as Brill had taken. He wheeled toward the source of the light, snapping down his automatic. But even as he did so, the detective’s .45 crashed, and outlined against the brief glare, Galt swayed and fell like a tall tree struck by lightning.

  “Dead?” asked the scientist, mechanically.

  “Bullet tore through his forearm and smashed his shoulder,” grunted Buckley. “Just knocked out temporarily. He’ll live to decorate the gallows.”

  “You — you heard — ?” Brill stuttered.

  “Everything. I was just coming around the bend of the lake shore and saw a light in Reynolds’ cottage, then your flash bobbing among the trees. I came sneaking through the bushes just in time to hear you give your translation of the nigger’s dying words. I’ve been prowling around this lake all night.”

  “You suspected Galt all the time?”

  The detective grinned wryly.

  “I ought to say yes, and establish myself as a super sleuth. But the fact is, I suspected you all the time. That’s why I came up here tonight — trying to figure out your connection with the murder. That alibi of yours was so iron-clad it looked phony to me. I had a sneaking suspicion that I’d bumped into a master-mind trying to put over the ‘perfect crime.’ I apologize! I’ve been reading too many detective stories lately!”

  * * *

  THE GRISLY HORROR; OR, MOON OF ZAMBEBWEI

  First published in Weird Tales, February 1935

  CONTENTS

  1. THE HORROR IN THE PINES

  2. BLACK TORTURE

  3. THE BLACK PRIEST

  4. THE BLACK GOD’S HUNGER

  5. THE VOICE OF ZEMBA

  1. THE HORROR IN THE PINES

  THE SILENCE of the pine woods lay like a brooding cloak about the soul of Bristol McGrath. The black shadows seemed fixed, immovable as the weight of superstition that overhung this forgotten back-country. Vague ancestral dreads stirred at the back of McGrath’s mind; for he was born in the pine woods, and sixteen years of roaming about the world had not erased their shadows. The fearsome tales at which he had shuddered as a child whispered again in his consciousness; tales of black shapes stalking the midnight glades...

  Cursing these childish memories, McGrath quickened his pace. The dim trail wound tortuously between dense walls of giant trees. No wonder he had been unable to hire anyone in the distant river village to drive him to the Ballville estate. The road was impassable for a vehicle, choked with rotting stumps and new growth. Ahead of him it bent sharply.

  McGrath halted short, frozen to immobility. The silence had been broken at last, in such a way as to bring a chill tingling to the backs of his hands. For the sound had been the unmistakable groan of a human being in agony. Only for an instant was McGrath motionless. Then he was gliding about the bend of the trail with the noiseless slouch of a hunting panther.

  A blue snub-nosed revolver had appeared as if by magic in his right hand. His left involuntarily clenched in his pocket on the bit of paper that was responsible for his presence in that grim forest. That paper was a frantic and mysterious appeal for aid; it was signed by McGrath’s worst enemy, and contained the name of a woman long dead.

  McGrath rounded the bend in the trail, every nerve tense and alert, expecting anything — except what he actually saw. His startled eyes hung on the grisly object for an instant, and then swept the forest walls. Nothing stirred there. A dozen feet back from the trail visibility vanished in a ghoulish twilight, where anything might lurk unseen. McGrath dropped to his knee beside the figure that lay in the trail before him.

  It was a man, spread-eagled, hands and feet bound to four pegs driven deeply in the hard-packed earth; a blackbearded, hook-nosed, swarthy man. “Ahmed!”, muttered McGrath. “Ballville’s Arab Servant! God!”

  For it was not the binding cords that brought the glaze to the Arab’s eyes. A weaker man than McGrath might have sickened at the mutilations which keen knives had wrought on the man’s body. McGrath recognized the work of an expert in the art of torture. Yet a spark of life still throbbed in the tough frame of the Arab. McGrath’s gray eyes grew bleaker as he noted the position of the victim’s body, and his mind flew back to another, grimmer jungle, and a half-flayed black man pegged out on a path as a warning to the white man who dared invade a forbidden land.

  He cut the cords, shifted the dying man to a more comfortable position. It was all he could do. He saw the delirium ebb momentarily in the bloodshot eyes, saw recognition glimmer there. Clots of bloody foam splashed the matted beard. The lips writhed soundlessly, and McGrath glimpsed the bloody stump of a severed tongue.

  The black-nailed fingers began scrabbling in the dust. They shook, clawing erratically, but with purpose. McGrath bent close, tense with interest, and saw crooked lines grow under the quivering fingers. With the last effort of an iron will, the Arab was tracing a message in the characters of his own language. McGrath recognized the name: “Richard Ballville”; it was followed by “danger,” and the hand waved weakly up the trail; then — and McGrath stiffened convulsively— “Constance.” One final effort of the dragging finger traced “John De Al—”.

  Suddenly the bloody frame was convulsed by one last sharp agony; the lean, sinewy hand knotted spasmodically and then fell limp. Ahmed ibn Suleyman was beyond vengeance or mercy.

  McGrath rose, dusting his hands, aware of the tense stillness of the grim woods around him; aware of a faint rustling in their depths that was not caused by any breeze. He looked down at the mangled figure with involuntary pity, though he knew well the foulness of the Arab’s heart, a black evil that had matched that of Ahmed’s master, Richard Ballville. Well, it seemed that master and man had at last met their match in human fiendishness. But who, or what? For a hundred years the Ballvilles had ruled supreme over this back-country, first over their wide plantations and hundreds of slaves, and later over the submissive descendants of those slaves. Richard, the last of the Ballvilles, had exercised as much authority over the pinelands as any of his autocratic ancestors. Yet from this country where men had bowed to the Ballvilles for a century, had come that frenzied cry of fear, a telegram that McGrath clenched in his coat pocket.

  Stillness succeeded the rustling, more sinister than any sound. McGrath knew he was watched; knew that the spot where Ahmed’s body lay was the iovisible deadline that had been drawn for him. He believed that he would be allowed to turn and retrace his steps unmolested to the distant village. He knew that if he continued on his way, death would strike him sud
denly and unseen. Turning, he strode back the way he had come.

  He made the turn and kept straight on until he had passed another crook in the trail. Then he halted, listened. All was silent. Quickly he drew the paper from his pocket, smoothed out the wrinkles and read, again, in the cramped scrawl of the man he hated most on earth:

  Bristol:

  If you still love Constance Brand, for God’s sake forget your hate and come to Ballville Manor as quickly as the devil can drive you.

  RICHARD BALLVILLE.

  That was all. It reached him by telegraph in that Far Western city where McGrath had resided since his return from Africa. He would have ignored it, but for the mention of Constance Brand. That name had sent a choking, agonizing pulse of amazement through his soul, had sent him racing toward the land of his birth by train and plane, as if, indeed, the devil were on his heels. It was the name of one he thought dead for three years; the name of the only woman Bristol McGrath had ever loved.

  Replacing the telegram, he left the trail and headed westward, pushing his powerful frame between the thickset trees. His feet made little sound on the matted pine needles. His progress was all but noiseless. Not for nothing had he spent his boyhood in the country of the big pines.

  Three hundred yards from the old road he came upon that which he sought — an ancient trail paralleling the road. Choked with young growth, it was little more than a trace through the thick pines. He knew that it ran to the back of the Ballville mansion; did not believe the secret watchers would be guarding it. For how could they know he remembered it?

  He hurried south along it, his ears whetted for any sound. Sight alone could not be trusted in that forest. The mansion, he knew, was not far away, now. He was passing through what had once been fields, in the days of Richard’s grandfather, running almost up to the spacious lawns that girdled the Manor. But for half a century they had been abandoned to the advance of the forest.