aloud, it being good practice for the approaching days on the
long, long trail:
‘ 7 hear in the chamber above me
The patter o f little feet,
The sound o f a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet. . . . ”
Here he ceased. Had he heard something in the passage—
or “ descending the broad hall stair” ? Because of the wind
outside, he could not be certain. It cost him a gritting of his
teeth to rise and open the parlor door. Of course no one could
be seen in the hall or on the stair. “ Crazy Frank,” men had
called him at Joliet and other prisons: he had clenched his
fists, but had kept a check upon himself. Didn’t Saint Paul
say that the violent take Heaven by storm? Perhaps he had
barked up the wrong tree; perhaps he would be spewed out
of His mouth for being too peacefid.
Shutting the door, he went back to the fireside. Those lines
of Longfellow had been no evocation. He put “ The Long,
Long Trail” on the old phonograph again, strolling about the
room until the record ran out. There was an old print of a
Great Lakes schooner on one wall that he liked. Beside it,
he noticed, there seemed to be some pellets embedded in a
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117
closet door-jamb, but painted over, as if someone had fired
a shotgun in the parlor in the old days. “ The violent take it
by storm . . . ’’ He admired the grand piano; perhaps Allegra
had learned to play it. There was one or two big notches or
gashes along one edge of the piano, varnished over, hard
though that wood was. Then Frank sank into the big chair
again and stared at the burning logs.
Just how long he had dozed, he did not know. He woke
abruptly. Had he heard a whisper, the faintest whisper? He
tensed to spring up. But before he could move, he saw reflections in the tall mirror.
Something had moved in the comer by the bookcase. No
doubt about it; that small something had stirred again. Also
something crept behind one o f the satin sofas, and something
else lurked near the piano. All these were at his back: he saw
the reflections in the glass, as in a glass darkly, more alarming
than physical forms. In this high shadowy room, the light of
the kerosene lamp and of the seven candles did not suffice.
From near the bookcase, the first of them emerged into
candlelight; then came the second, and the third. They were
giggling, but he could not hear them—only see their faces,
and those not clearly. He was unable to stir, and the goose-
flesh prickled all over him, and his hair rose at the back of
his big head.
They were three little girls, barefoot, in their long muslin
nightgowns, ready for bed. One may have been as much as
twelve years old, and the smallest was little more than a baby.
The middle one was Allegra, tiny even for her tender years,
and a little imp: he knew, he knew! They were playing
Creepmouse.
The three of them stole forward, Allegra in the lead, her
qres alight. He could see them plain now, and the dread was
ebbing out of him. He might have risen and turned to greet
them across the great gulf of time, but any action—why, what
might it do to these little ones? Frank sat frozen in his chair,
looking at the nimble reflections in the mirror, and nearer
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they came, perfectly silent. Allegra vanished from the glass,
which meant that she must be standing just behind him.
He must please them. Could he speak? He tried, and the
lines came out hoarsely:
"Down, down, down in Creepmouse Town
All the lamps are low.
And the little rodent f e e t . . . ”
He was not permitted to finish. Wow! There came a light
tug at the curly white hair on the back of his head. Oh, to
talk with Allegra, the imp! Reckless, he heaved his bulk out
of the chair, and swung round—too late.
The parlor door was closing. But from the hall came another whisper, ever so faint, ever so unmistakable: “ Good night, Frank! ’ ’ There followed subdued giggles, scampering,
and then the silence once more.
He strode to the parlor door. The hall was empty again,
and the broad stair. Should he follow them up? No, all three
would be abed now. Should he knock at Mama’s Room, muttering, “ Mrs. Anthony, are the children all right?” No, he hadn’t the nerve for that, and it would be presumptuous. He
had been given one moment of perception, and no more.
Somehow he knew that they would not go so fer as the
garret floor. Ah, he needed fresh air! He snuffed out lamp
and candles, except for one candlestick—Allegra’s—that he
took with him. Out into the hall he went. He unfastened the
front door with that oaken patch about the middle of it, and
stepped upon the porch, leaving the burning candle just within
the hall. The wind had risen again, bringing still more snow.
It was black as sin outside, and the temperature must.be
thirty below.
To him the wind bore one erratic peal of the desolate
church-bell of Anthonyville, and then another. How strong
the blast must be through that belfry! Frank retreated inside
from that unfathomable darkness and that sepulchral bell
which seemed to toll for him. He locked the thick door be
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119
hind him and screwed up his courage for the expedition to
his room at the top of the old house.
But why shudder? He loved them now, Allegra most of all.
Up the broad stairs to the second floor he went, hearing only
his own clumsy footfalls, and past the clay-sealed doors of
the General and Father and Mama and Alice and Allegra and
Edith. No one whispered, no one scampered.
In Frank’s Room, he rolled himself in his blankets and
quilt (had Allegra helped stitch the patchwork?), and almost
at once the consciousness went out of him, and he must have
slept dreamless for the first night since he was a farm boy.
So profound had been his sleep, deep almost as death, that
the siren may have been wailing for some minutes before at
last it roused him. Frank knew that horrid sound: it had called
for him thrice before, as he fled from prisons. Who wanted
him now? He heaved his ponderous body out of the warm
bed. The candle that he had brought up from the Sunday
parlor and left burning all night was flickering in its socket,
but by that flame he could see the hour on his watch: seven
o’clock, too soon for dawn.
Through the narrow skylight, as he flung on his clothes,
the sky glowed an unnatural red, though it was long before
sunup. The prison siren ceased to wail, as if choked off.
Frank lumbered to the little frieze-window, and saw to the
north, perhaps two miles distant, a monstrous mass of flame
shooting high into the air. The prison was afire.
Then came shots outside: first the bark of a heavy revolver,
followed irregu
larly by blasts of shotguns or rifles. Frank was
lacing his boots with a swiftness uncongenial to him. He got
into his overcoat as there came a crashing and battering down
below. That sound, too, he recognized, wood-chopper that
he had been: axes shattering the front door.
Amid this pandemonium, Frank was too bewildered to
grasp altogether where he was or even how this catastrophe
might be fitted into the pattern of time. All that mattered was
flight; the scheme of his escape remained clear in his mind.
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Pull up the chair below the skylight, heave yourself out to
the upper roof, descend those iron rungs to the woodshed
roof, make for the other side of the freeway, then—why, then
you must trust to circumstance, Frank. It’s that long, long
trail a-winding for you.
Now he heard a woman screaming within the house, and
slipped and fumbled in his alarm. He had got upon the chair,
opened the skylight, and was trying to obtain a good grip on
the icy outer edge of the skylight-frame, when someone
knocked and kicked at the door of Frank’s Room.
Yet those were puny knocks and kicks. He was about to
heave himself upward when, in a relative quiet—the screaming had ceased for a moment—he heard a little shrill voice outside his door, urgently pleading: “ Frank, Frank, let me
in!”
He was arrested in flight as though great weights had been
clamped to his ankles. That little voice he knew, as if it were
part of him: Allegra’s voice.
For a brief moment he still meant to scramble out the skylight. But the sweet little voice was begging. He stumbled off the chair, upset it, and was at the door in one stride.
“ Is that you, Allegra?”
“ Open it, Frank, please open it!”
He turned the key and pulled the bolt. On the threshold
the little girl stood, indistinct by the dying candlelight, terribly pale, all tears, frantic.
Frank snatched her up. Ah, this was the dear real Allegra
Anthony, all warm and soft and sobbing, flesh and blood! He
kissed her cheek gently.
She clung to him in terror, and then squirmed loose, tugging at his heavy hand: “ Oh, Frank, come on! Come downstairs! They’re hurting Mama!”
“ Who is, little girl?” He held her tiny hand, his body
quivering with dread and indecision. “ Who’s down there,
Allegra?”
“ The bad men! Come on, Frank!” Braver than he, the
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121
little thing plunged back down the garret stair into the blackness below.
“ Allegra! Come back here—come back now!” He bellowed it, but she was gone.
Up two flights of stairs, there poured to him a tumult of
shrieks, curses, laughter, breaking noises. Several men were
below, their, speech slurred and raucous. He did not need
Allegra to tell him what kind of men they were, for he heard
prison slang and prison foulness, and he shook all over. There
still was the skylight.
He would have turned back to that hole in the roof, had
not Allegra squealed in pain somewhere on the second floor.
Dazed, trembling, unarmed, Frank went three steps down the
garret staircase. “ Allegra! Little girl! What is it, Allegra?”
Someone was charging up the stair toward him. It was a
burly man in the prison uniform, a lighted lantern in one
hand and a glittering axe in the other. Frank had no time to
turn. The man screeched obscenely at him, and swung that
axe.
In those close quarters, wielded by a drunken man, it was
a chancy weapon. The edge shattered the plaster wall; the
flat of the blade thumped upon Frank’s shoulder. Frank,
lurching forward, took the man by the throat with a mighty
grip. They all tumbled pellmell down the steep stairs—the
two men, the axe, the lantern.
Frank’s ursine bulk landed atop the stranger’s body, and
Frank heard his adversary’s bones crunch. The lantern had
broken and gone out. The convict’s head hung loose on his
shoulders, Frank found as he groped for the axe. Then he
trampled over the fallen man and flung himself along the
corridor, gripping the axe-helve. “ Allegra! Allegra girl!”
From the head of the main stair, he could see that the
lamps and candles were burning in the hall and in the rooms
of the ground floor. All three children were down there, wailing, and above their noise rose Mama’s shrieks again. A mob of men were stamping, breaking things, roaring with amusement and desire, shouting filth. A bottle shattered.
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His heart pounding as if it would burst out of his chest,
Frank hurried rashly down that stair and went, all crimson
with fury, into the Sunday parlor, the double-bitted axe
swinging in his hand. They all were there: the little girls,
Mama, and five wild men. “ Stop that!” Frank roared with
all the power of his lungs. “ You let them go!”
Everyone in the parlor stood transfixed at that summons
like the Last Trump. Allegra had been tugging pathetically
at the leg of a dark man who gripped her mother’s waist, and
the other girls sputtered and sobbed, cornered, as a tall man
poured a bottle of whiskey over them. Mrs. Anthony’s gown
was ripped nearly its whole length, and a third man was
bending her backward by her long hair, ds if he would snap
her spine. Near the hall door stood a man like a long lean
rat, the Rat of Creepmouse Town, a shotgun on his arm,
gape-jawed at Frank’s intervention. Guns and axes lay scattered about the Tbrkey carpet. By the fireplace, a fifth man had been heating the poker in the flames.
For that tableau-moment, they all stared astonished at the
raving giant who had burst upon them; and the giant, puffing,
stared back with his strange blue eyes. “ Oh, Frank!” Allegra
sobbed: it was more command than entreaty—as if, Frank
thought in a flash of insane mirth, he were like the boy in the
fairy tale who could cry confidently, “ All heads off but mine!”
He knew what these men were, the rats and bats of Creep-
mouse Town: the worst men in any prison, lifers who had
made their hell upon earth, killers all of them and worse than
killers. The rotten damnation showed in all those flushed and
drunken faces. Then the dark man let go of Mama and said
in relief, with a coughing laugh, “ Hell, it’s only old Punkin-
head Frank, clowning again! Have some fun for yourself,
Frank boy!”
“ Hey, Frank,” Ratface asked, his shotgun crooked under
his arm, “ where’d the old man keep his money?”
Frank towered there perplexed, the berserker-lust draining
out of him, almost bashful—and frightened worse than ever
before in all his years on the trail. What should he shout now?
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123
What should he do? Who was he to resist such perfect evil?
They were five to one, and those five were fiends from down
under, and that one a coward. Long ago he had been weighed
in the balance and found wantin
g.
Mama was the first to break the tableau. Her second captor
had relaxed his clutch upon her hair, and she prodded the
little girls before her, and she leaped for the door.
The hair-puller was after her at once, but she bounded past
Ratface’s shotgun, which had wavered toward Frank, and Alice and Edith were ahead of her. Allegra, her eyes wide and desperate, tripped over the rung of a broken chair. Everything happened in half a second. The hair-puller caught Allegra by her little ankle.
Then Frank bellowed again, loudest in all his life, and he
swung his axe high above his head and downward, a skillful
dreadful stroke, catching the hair-puller’s arm just below the
shoulder. At once the man began to scream and spout, while
Allegra fled after her mother.
Falling, the hair-puller collided with Ratface, spoiling his
aim, but one barrel of the shotgun fired, and Frank felt pain
in his side. His bloody axe on high, he hulked between the
five men and the door.
All the men’s faces were glaring at Frank, incredulously,
as if demanding how he dared stir against them. Three convicts were scrabbling tipsily for weapons on the floor. As Frank strode among them, he saw the expression on those
faces change from gloating to desperation. Just as his second
blow descended, there passed through his mind a kind of
fleshly collage of death he had seen once at a farmyard gate:
the corpses of five weasels nailed to a gatepost by the farmer,
their frozen open jaws agape like damned souls in Hell.
“ All heads off but mine!” Frank heard himself braying.
‘‘All heads off but mine!” He hacked and hewed, his own
screams of lunatic fury drowning their screams of terror.
For less than three minutes, shots, thuds, shrieks, crashes,
terrible wailing. They could not get past him to the doorway.
‘‘Come on!” Frank was raging as he stood in the middle
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of the parlor. ‘ ‘Come on, who’s next? All heads off but mine!
Who’s next?”
There came no answer but a ghastly rattle from one of the
five heaps that littered the carpet. Blood-soaked from hair to
boots, the berserker towered alone, swaying where he stood.
His mind began to clear. He had been shot twice, Frank
guessed, and the pain at his heart was frightful. Into his frantic consciousness burst all the glory of what he had done, and all the horror.
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 15