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Title: Fearful rock
Author: Manly Wade Wellman
Release date: July 11, 2024 [eBook #74018]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Weird Tales, 1939
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FEARFUL ROCK ***
Fearful Rock
By MANLY WADE WELLMAN
_An eery tale of the American Civil War, and the uncanny evil being
who called himself Persil Mandifer, and his lovely daughter--a tale
of dark powers and weird happenings._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales February, March, April 1939.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_1. The Sacrifice_
Enid Mandifer tried to stand up under what she had just heard. She
managed it, but her ears rang, her eyes misted. She felt as if she were
drowning.
The voice of Persil Mandifer came through the fog, level and slow, with
the hint of that foreign accent which nobody could identify:
"Now that you know that you are not really my daughter, perhaps you are
curious as to why I adopted you."
Curious ... was that the word to use? But this man who was not her
father after all, he delighted in understatements. Enid's eyes had
grown clearer now. She was able to move, to obey Persil Mandifer's
invitation to seat herself. She saw him, half sprawling in his
rocking-chair against the plastered wall of the parlor, under the
painting of his ancient friend Aaron Burr. Was the rumor true, she
mused, that Burr had not really died, that he still lived and planned
ambitiously to make himself a throne in America? But Aaron Burr would
have to be an old, old man--a hundred years old, or more than a hundred.
Persil Mandifer's own age might have been anything, but probably he
was nearer seventy than fifty. Physically he was the narrowest of
men, in shoulders, hips, temples and legs alike, so that he appeared
distorted and compressed. White hair, like combed thistledown, fitted
itself in ordered streaks to his high skull. His eyes, dull and dark as
musket-balls, peered expressionlessly above the nose like a stiletto,
the chin like the pointed toe of a fancy boot. The fleshlessness of his
legs was accentuated by tight trousers, strapped under the insteps. At
his throat sprouted a frill of lace, after a fashion twenty-five years
old.
At his left, on a stool, crouched his enormous son Larue. Larue's body
was a collection of soft-looking globes and bladders--a tremendous
belly, round-kneed short legs, puffy hands, a gross bald head between
fat shoulders. His white linen suit was only a shade paler than his
skin, and his loose, faded-pink lips moved incessantly. Once Enid had
heard him talking to himself, had been close enough to distinguish the
words. Over and over he had said: "I'll kill you. I'll kill you. I'll
kill you."
These two men had reared her from babyhood, here in this low, spacious
manor of brick and timber in the Ozark country. Sixteen or eighteen
years ago there had been Indians hereabouts, but they were gone, and
the few settlers were on remote farms. The Mandifers dwelt alone with
their slaves, who were unusually solemn and taciturn for Negroes.
Persil Mandifer was continuing: "I have brought you up as a gentleman
would bring up his real daughter--for the sole and simple end of
making her a good wife. That explains, my dear, the governess,
the finishing-school at St. Louis, the books, the journeys we have
undertaken to New Orleans and elsewhere. I regret that this distressing
war between the states," and he paused to draw from his pocket his
enameled snuff-box, "should have made recent junkets impracticable.
However, the time has come, and you are not to be despised. Your
marriage is now to befall you."
"Marriage," mumbled Larue, in a voice that Enid was barely able to
hear. His fingers interlaced, like fat white worms in a jumble. His
eyes were for Enid, his ears for his father.
Enid saw that she must respond. She did so: "You have--chosen a husband
for me?"
Persil Mandifer's lips crawled into a smile, very wide on his narrow
blade of a face, and he took a pinch of snuff. "Your husband, my dear,
was chosen before ever you came into this world," he replied. The smile
grew broader, but Enid did not think it cheerful. "Does your mirror do
you justice?" he teased her. "Enid, my foster-daughter, does it tell
you truly that you are a beauty, with a face all lustrous and oval,
eyes full of tender fire, a cascade of golden-brown curls to frame the
whole?" His gaze wandered upon her body, and his eyelids drooped. "Does
it convince you, Enid, that your figure combines rarely those traits of
fragility and rondure that are never so desirable as when they occur
together? Ah, Enid, had I myself met you, or one like you, thirty years
ago----"
"Father!" growled Larue, as though at sacrilege. Persil Mandifer
chuckled. His left hand, white and slender with a dark cameo upon
the forefinger, extended and patted Larue's repellent bald pate, in
superior affection.
"Never fear, son," crooned Persil Mandifer. "Enid shall go a pure bride
to him who waits her." His other hand crept into the breast of his coat
and drew forth something on a chain. It looked like a crucifix.
"Tell me," pleaded the girl, "tell me, fa----" She broke off, for she
could not call him father. "What is the name of the one I am to marry?"
"His name?" said Larue, as though aghast at her ignorance.
"His name?" repeated the lean man in the rocking-chair. The
crucifix-like object in his hands began to swing idly and rhythmically,
while he paid out chain to make its pendulum motion wider and slower.
"He has no name."
* * * * *
Enid felt her lips grow cold and dry. "He has no----"
"He is the Nameless One," said Persil Mandifer, and she could discern
the capital letters in the last two words he spoke.
"Look," said Larue, out of the corner of his weak mouth that was
nearest his father. "She thinks that she is getting ready to run."
"She will not run," assured Persil Mandifer. "She will sit and listen,
and watch what I have here in my hand." The object on the chain seemed
to be growing in size and clarity of outline. Enid felt that it might
not be a crucifix, after all.
"The Nameless One is also ageless," continued Persil Mandifer. "My
dear, I dislike telling you all about him, and it is not really
necessary. All you need know is that we--my fathers and I--have served
him here, and in Europe, since the days when France was Gaul. Yes, and
before that."
The swinging object really was increasing in her sight. And the basic
cross was no cross, but a three-armed thing like a capital T. Nor
was the body-like figure spiked to it; it seemed to twine and clamber
upon that T-shape, like a monkey on a bracket. Like a monkey, it was
grotesque, disproportionate, a mockery. That climbing creature was made
of gold, or of something gilded over. The T-shaped support was as black
and bright as jet.
[Illustration: "The swinging object was increasing in her sight."]
Enid thought that the golden creature was dull, as if tarnished, and
that it appeared to move; an effect created, perhaps, by the rhythmic
swinging on the chain.
"Our profits from the association have been great," Persil Mandifer
droned. "Yet we have given greatly. Four times in each hundred years
must a bride be offered."
Mist was gathering once more, in Enid's eyes and brain, a thicker mist
than the one that had come from the shock of hearing that she was an
adopted orphan. Yet through it all she saw the swinging device, the
monkey-like climber upon the T. And through it all she heard Mandifer's
voice:
"When my real daughter, the last female of my race, went to the
Nameless One, I wondered where our next bride would come from. And so,
twenty years ago, I took you from a foundling asylum at Nashville."
It was becoming plausible to her now. There was a power to be
worshipped, to be feared, to be fed with young women. She must go--no,
this sort of belief was wrong. It had no element of decency in it, it
was only beaten into her by the spell of the pendulum-swinging charm.
Yet she had heard certain directions, orders as to what to do.
"You will act in the manner I have described, and say the things I have
repeated, tonight at sundown," Mandifer informed her, as though from a
great distance. "You will surrender yourself to the Nameless One, as it
was ordained when first you came into my possession."
"No," she tried to say, but her lips would not even stir. Something had
crept into her, a will not her own, which was forcing her to accept
defeat. She knew she must go--where?
"To Fearful Rock," said the voice of Mandifer, as though he had heard
and answered the question she had not spoken. "Go there, to that house
where once my father lived and worshipped, that house which, upon the
occasion of his rather mysterious death, I left. It is now our place
of devotion and sacrifice. Go there, Enid, tonight at sundown, in the
manner I have prescribed...."
_2. The Cavalry Patrol_
Lieutenant Kane Lanark was one of those strange and vicious
heritage-anomalies of one of the most paradoxical of wars--a war
where a great Virginian was high in Northern command, and a great
Pennsylvanian stubbornly defended one of the South's principal
strongholds; where the two presidents were both born in Kentucky,
indeed within scant miles of each other; where father strove against
son, and brother against brother, even more frequently and tragically
than in all the jangly verses and fustian dramas of the day.
Lanark's birthplace was a Maryland farm, moderately prosperous. His
education had been completed at the Virginia Military Institute,
where he was one of a very few who were inspired by a quiet, bearded
professor of mathematics who later became the Stonewall of the
Confederacy, perhaps the continent's greatest tactician. The older
Lanark was strongly for state's rights and mildly for slavery, though
he possessed no Negro chattels. Kane, the younger of two sons, had
carried those same attitudes with him as much as seven miles past the
Kansas border, whither he had gone in 1861 to look for employment and
adventure.
At that lonely point he met with Southern guerrillas, certain
loose-shirted, weapon-laden gentry whose leader, a gaunt young man
with large, worried eyes, bore the craggy name of Quantrill and was to
be called by a later historian the bloodiest man in American history.
Young Kane Lanark, surrounded by sudden leveled guns, protested his
sympathy with the South by birth, education and personal preference.
Quantrill replied, rather sententiously, that while this might be true,
Lanark's horse and money-belt had a Yankee look to them, and would be
taken as prisoners of war.
After the guerrillas had galloped away, with a derisive laugh hanging
in the air behind them, Lanark trudged back to the border and a little
settlement, where he begged a ride by freight wagon to St. Joseph,
Missouri. There he enlisted with a Union cavalry regiment just then in
the forming, and his starkness of manner, with evidences about him of
military education and good sense, caused his fellow recruits to elect
him a sergeant.
Late that year, Lanark rode with a patrol through southern Missouri,
where fortune brought him and his comrades face to face with
Quantrill's guerrillas, the same that had plundered Lanark. The
lieutenant in charge of the Federal cavalry set a most hysterical
example for flight, and died of six Southern bullets placed accurately
between his shoulder blades; but Lanark, as ranking non-commissioned
officer, rallied the others, succeeded in withdrawing them in order
before the superior force. As he rode last of the retreat, he had the
fierce pleasure of engaging and sabering an over-zealous guerrilla, who
had caught up with him. The patrol rejoined its regiment with only two
lost, the colonel was pleased to voice congratulations and Sergeant
Lanark became Lieutenant Lanark, vice the slain officer.
In April of 1862, General Curtis, recently the victor in the
desperately fought battle of Pea Ridge, showed trust and understanding
when he gave Lieutenant Lanark a scouting party of twenty picked
riders, with orders to seek yet another encounter with the marauding
Quantrill. Few Union officers wanted anything to do with Quantrill,
but Lanark, remembering his harsh treatment at those avaricious hands,
yearned to kill the guerrilla chieftain with his own proper sword.
On the afternoon of April fifth, beneath a sun bright but none too
warm, the scouting patrol rode down a trail at the bottom of a great,
trough-like valley just south of the Missouri-Arkansas border. Two
pairs of men, those with the surest-footed mounts, acted as flanking
parties high on the opposite slopes, and a watchful corporal by the
name of Googan walked his horse well in advance of the main body. The
others rode two and two, with Lanark at the head and Sergeant Jager,
heavy-set and morosely keen of eye, at the rear.
A photograph survives of Lieutenant Kane Lanark as he appeared that
very spring--his breadth of shoulder and slimness of waist accentuated
by the snug blue cavalry jacket that terminated at his sword-belt, his
ruddy, beak-nosed face shaded by a wide black hat with a gold cord. He
wore a mustache, trim but not gay, and his long chin alone of all his
command went smooth-shaven. To these details be it added that he rode
his bay gelding easily, with a light, sure hand on the reins, and that
he had the air of one who knew his present business.
The valley opened at length upon a wide level platter of land among
high, pine-tufted hills. The flat expanse was no more than half
timbered, though clever enemies might advance unseen across it if they
exercised caution and foresight enough to slip from one belt or clump
of trees to the next. Almost at the center of the level, a good five
miles from where Lanark now halted his command stood a single great
chimney or finger of rock, its lean tip more than twice the height of
the tallest tree within view.
To this geologic curiosity the eyes of Lieutenant Lanark snapped at
once.
"Sergeant!" he called, and Jager sidled his horse close.
"We'll head for that rock, and stop there," Lanark announced. "It's
a natural watch-tower, and from the top of it we can see everything,
even better than we could if we rode clear across flat ground to those
hills. And if Quantrill is west of us, which I'm sure he is, I'd like
to see him coming a long way off, so as to know whether to fight or
run."
"I agree with you, sir," said Jager. He peered through narrow, puffy
lids at the pinnacle, and gnawed his shaggy lower lip. "I shall lift
up mine eyes unto the rocks, from whence cometh my help," he misquoted
reverently. The sergeant was full of garbled Scripture, and the men
called him "Bible" Jager behind that wide back of his. This did not
mean that he was soft, dreamy or easily fooled; Curtis had chosen him
as sagely as he had chosen Lanark.
* * * * *
Staying in the open as much as possible, the party advanced upon the
rock. They found it standing above a soft, grassy hollow, which in turn
ran eastward from the base of the rock to a considerable ravine, dark
and full of timber. As they spread out to the approach, they found
something else; a house stood in the hollow, shadowed by the great
pinnacle.
"It looks deserted, sir," volunteered Jager, at Lanark's bridle-elbow.
"No sign of life."
"Perhaps," said Lanark. "Deploy the men, and we'll close in from all
sides. Then you, with one man, enter the back door. I'll take another
and enter the front."
"Good, sir." The sergeant kneed his horse into a faster walk, passing
from one to another of the three corporals with muttered orders. Within
sixty seconds the patrol closed upon the house like a twenty-fingered
hand. Lanark saw that the building had once been pretentious--two
stories, stoutly made of good lumber that must have been carted from
a distance, with shuttered windows and a high peaked roof. Now it was
a paint-starved gray, with deep veins and traceries of dirty black
upon its clapboards. He dismounted before the piazza with its four
pillar-like posts, and threw his reins to a trooper.
"Suggs!" he called, and obediently his own personal orderly, a plump
blond youth, dropped out of the saddle. Together they walked up on
the resounding planks of the piazza. Lanark, his ungloved right hand
swinging free beside his holster, knocked at the heavy front door with
his left fist. There was no answer. He tried the knob, and after a
moment of shoving, the hinges creaked and the door went open.
They walked into a dark front hall, then into a parlor with dust upon
the rug and the fine furniture, and rectangles of pallor upon the walls
where pictures had once hung for years. They could hear echoes of their
every movement, as anyone will hear in a house to which he is not
accustomed. Beyond the parlor, they came to an ornate chandelier with
crystal pendants, and at the rear stood a sideboard of dark, hard wood.
Its drawers all hung half open, as if the silver and linen had been
hastily removed. Above it hung plate-racks, also empty.
Feet sounded in a room to the rear, and then Jager's voice, asking if
his lieutenant were inside. Lanark met him in the kitchen, conferred;
then together they mounted the stairs in the front hall.
Several musty bedrooms, darkened by closed shutters, occupied the
second floor. The beds had dirty mattresses, but no sheets or blankets.
"All clear in the house," pronounced Lanark. "Jager, go and detail a
squad to reconnoiter in that little ravine east of here--we want no
rebel sharpshooters sneaking up on us from that point. Then leave a
picket there, put a man on top of the rock, and guards at the front and
rear of this house. And have some of the others police up the house
itself. We may stay here for two days, even longer."
The sergeant saluted, then went to bellow his orders, and troopers
dashed hither and thither to obey. In a moment the sound of sweeping
arose from the parlor. Lanark, to whom it suggested spring cleaning,
sneezed at thought of the dust, then gave Suggs directions about the
care of his bay. Unbuckling his saber, he hung it upon the saddle, but
his revolver he retained. "You're in charge, Jager," he called, and
sauntered away toward the wooded cleft.
His legs needed the exercise; he could feel them straightening
by degrees after their long clamping to his saddle-flaps. He was
uncomfortably dusty, too, and there must be water at the bottom of the
ravine. Walking into the shade of the trees, he heard, or fancied he
heard, a trickling sound. The slope was steep here, and he walked fast
to maintain an easy balance upon it, for a minute and then two. There
was water ahead, all right, for it gleamed through the leafage. And
something else gleamed, something pink.
That pinkness was certainly flesh. His right hand dropped quickly to
his revolver-butt, and he moved forward carefully. Stooping, he took
advantage of the bushy cover, at the same time avoiding a touch that
might snap or rustle the foliage. He could hear a voice now, soft and
rhythmic. Lanark frowned. A woman's voice? His right hand still at his
weapon, his left caught and carefully drew down a spray of willow. He
gazed into an open space beyond.
It was a woman, all right, within twenty yards of him. She stood
ankle-deep in a swift, narrow rush of brook-water, and her fine body
was nude, every graceful curve of it, with a cascade of golden-brown
hair falling and floating about her shoulders. She seemed to be
praying, but her eyes were not lifted. They stared at a hand-mirror,
that she held up to catch the last flash of the setting sun.
_3. The Image in the Cellar_
Lanark, a young, serious-minded bachelor in an era when women swaddled
themselves inches deep in fabric, had never seen such a sight before;
and to his credit be it said that his first and strongest emotion was
proper embarrassment for the girl in the stream. He had a momentary
impulse to slip back and away. Then he remembered that he had ordered a
patrol to explore this place; it would be here within moments.
Therefore he stepped into the open, wondering at the time, as well as
later, if he did well.
"Miss," he said gently. "Miss, you'd better put on your things. My
men----"
She stared, squeaked in fear, dropped the mirror and stood motionless.
Then she seemed to gather herself for flight. Lanark realized that
the trees beyond her were thick and might hide enemies, that she was
probably a resident of this rebel-inclined region and might be a decoy
for such as himself. He whipped out his revolver, holding it at the
ready but not pointing it.
"Don't run," he warned her sharply. "Are those your clothes beside you?
Put them on at once."
She caught up a dress of flowered calico and fairly flung it on over
her head. His embarrassment subsided a little, and he came another
pace or two into the open. She was pushing her feet--very small
feet they were--into heelless shoes. Her hands quickly gathered up
some underthings and wadded them into a bundle. She gazed at him
apprehensively, questioningly. Her hastily-donned dress remained
unfastened at the throat, and he could see the panicky stir of her
heart in her half-bared bosom.
"I'm sorry," he went on, "but I think you'd better come up to the house
with me."
"House?" she repeated fearfully, and her dark, wide eyes turned to look
beyond him. Plainly she knew which house he meant. "You--live there?"
"I'm staying there at this time."
"You--came for me?" Apparently she had expected someone to come.
But instead of answering, he put a question of his own. "To whom were
you talking just now? I could hear you."
"I--I said the words. The words my faith----" She broke off,
wretchedly, and Lanark was forced to think how pretty she was in her
confusion. "The words that Persil Mandifer told me to say." Her eyes on
his, she continued softly: "I came to meet the Nameless One. Are you
the--Nameless One?"
[Illustration: "Are you the Nameless One?"]
"I am certainly not nameless," he replied. "I am Lieutenant Lanark, of
the Federal Army of the Frontier, at your service." He bowed slightly,
which made it more formal. "Now, come along with me."
He took her by the wrist, which shook in his big left hand. Together
they went back eastward through the ravine, in the direction of the
house.
Before they reached it, she told him her name, and that the big natural
pillar was called Fearful Rock. She also assured him that she knew
nothing of Quantrill and his guerrillas; and a fourth item of news
shook Lanark to his spurred heels, the first non-military matter that
had impressed him in more than a year.
An hour later, Lanark and Jager finished an interview with her in the
parlor. They called Suggs, who conducted the young woman up to one of
the bedrooms. Then lieutenant and sergeant faced each other. The light
was dim, but each saw bafflement and uneasiness in the face of the
other.
"Well?" challenged Lanark.
Jager produced a clasp-knife, opened it, and pared thoughtfully at
a thumbnail. "I'll take my oath," he ventured, "that this Miss Enid
Mandifer is telling the gospel truth."
"Truth!" exploded Lanark scornfully. "Mountain-folk ignorance, I call
it. Nobody believes in those devil-things these days."
"Oh, yes, somebody does," said Jager, mildly but definitely. "I do." He
put away his knife and fumbled within his blue army shirt. "Look here,
Lieutenant."
It was a small book he held out, little more than a pamphlet in size
and thickness. On its cover of gray paper appeared the smudged woodcut
of an owl against a full moon, and the title:
John George Hohman's
POW-WOWS
or
LONG LOST FRIEND
"I got it when I was a young lad in Pennsylvania," explained Jager,
almost reverently. "Lots of Pennsylvania people carry this book, as I
do." He opened the little volume, and read from the back of the title
page:
"'Whosoever carries this book with him is safe from all his enemies,
visible or invisible; and whoever has this book with him cannot die
without the holy corpse of Jesus Christ, nor drown in any water nor
burn up in any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him.'"
* * * * *
Lanark put out his hand for the book, and Jager surrendered it,
somewhat hesitantly. "I've heard of supposed witches in Pennsylvania,"
said the officer. "Hexes, I believe they're called. Is this a witch
book?"
"No, sir. Nothing about black magic. See the cross on that page? It's a
protection against witches."
"I thought that only Catholics used the cross," said Lanark.
"No. Not only Catholics."
"Hmm." Lanark passed the thing back. "Superstition, I call it.
Nevertheless, you speak this much truth: that girl is in earnest, she
believes what she told us. Her father, or stepfather, or whoever he is,
sent her up here on some ridiculous errand--perhaps a dangerous one."
He paused. "Or I may be misjudging her. It may be a clever scheme,
Jager--a scheme to get a spy in among us."
The sergeant's big bearded head wagged negation. "No, sir. If she was
telling a lie, it'd be a more believable one, wouldn't it?" He opened
his talisman book again. "If the lieutenant please, there's a charm in
here, against being shot or stabbed. It might be a good thing, seeing
there's a war going on--perhaps the lieutenant would like me to copy it
out?"
"No, thanks." Lanark drew forth his own charm against evil and
nervousness, a leather case that contained cheroots. Jager, who had
convictions against the use of tobacco, turned away disapprovingly as
his superior bit off the end of a fragrant brown cylinder and kindled a
match.
"Let me look at that what-do-you-call-it book again," he requested, and
for a second time Jager passed the little volume over, then saluted and
retired.
Darkness was gathering early, what with the position of the house in
the grassy hollow, and the pinnacle of Fearful Rock standing between
it and the sinking sun to westward. Lanark called for Suggs to bring a
candle, and, when the orderly obeyed, directed him to take some kind of
supper upstairs to Enid Mandifer. Left alone, the young officer seated
himself in a newly dusted armchair of massive dark wood, emitted a
cloud of blue tobacco smoke, and opened the _Long Lost Friend_.
It had no publication date, but John George Hohman, the author, dated
his preface from Berks County, Pennsylvania, on July 31, 1819. In
the secondary preface filled with testimonials as to the success of
Hohman's miraculous cures, was included the pious ejaculation: "The
Lord bless the beginning and the end of this little work, and be with
us, that we may not misuse it, and thus commit a heavy sin!"
"Amen to that!" said Lanark to himself, quite soberly. Despite his
assured remarks to Jager, he was somewhat repelled and nervous because
of the things Enid Mandifer had told him.
Was there, then, potentiality for such supernatural evil in this
enlightened Nineteenth Century, even in the pages of the book he held?
He read further, and came upon a charm to be recited against violence
and danger, perhaps the very one Jager had offered to copy for him. It
began rather sonorously: "The peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with
me. Oh shot, stand still! In the name of the mighty prophets Agtion and
Elias, and do not kill me...."
Lanark remembered the name of Elias from his boyhood Sunday schooling,
but Agtion's identity, as a prophet or otherwise, escaped him. He
resolved to ask Jager; and, as though the thought had acted as a
summons, Jager came almost running into the room.
"Lieutenant, sir! Lieutenant!" he said hoarsely.
"Yes, Sergeant Jager?" Lanark rose, stared questioningly, and held out
the book. Jager took it automatically, and as automatically stowed it
inside his shirt.
"I can prove, sir, that there's a real devil here," he mouthed
unsteadily.
"What?" demanded Lanark. "Do you realize what you're saying, man?
Explain yourself."
"Come, sir," Jager almost pleaded, and led the way into the kitchen.
"It's down in the cellar."
From a little heap on a table he picked up a candle, and then opened a
door full of darkness.
The stairs to the cellar were shaky to Lanark's feet, and beneath
him was solid black shadow, smelling strongly of damp earth. Jager,
stamping heavily ahead, looked back and upward. That broad, bearded
face, that had not lost its full-blooded flush in the hottest fighting
at Pea Ridge, had grown so pallid as almost to give off sickly light.
Lanark began to wonder if all this theatrical approach would not make
the promised devil seem ridiculous, anti-climactic--the flutter of an
owl, the scamper of a rat, or something of that sort.
"You have the candle, sergeant," he reminded, and the echo of his voice
momentarily startled him. "Strike a match, will you?"
"Yes, sir." Jager had raised a knee to tighten his stripe-sided
trousers. A snapping scrape, a burst of flame, and the candle glow
illuminated them both. It revealed, too, the cellar, walled with stones
but floored with clay. As they finished the descent, Lanark could feel
the soft grittiness of that clay under his bootsoles. All around them
lay rubbish--boxes, casks, stacks of broken pots and dishes, bundles
of kindling.
"Here," Jager was saying, "here is what I found."
* * * * *
He walked around the foot of the stairs. Beneath the slope of the
flight lay a long, narrow case, made of plain, heavy boards. It was
unpainted and appeared ancient. As Jager lowered the light in his hand,
Lanark saw that the joinings were secured with huge nails, apparently
forged by hand. Such nails had been used in building the older sheds
on his father's Maryland estate. Now there was a creak of wooden
protest as Jager pried up the loosened lid of the coffin-like box.
Inside lay something long and ruddy. Lanark saw a head and shoulders,
and started violently. Jager spoke again:
"An image, sir. A heathen image." The light made grotesque the
sergeant's face, one heavy half fully illumined, the other secret and
lost in the black shadow. "Look at it."
Lanark, too, stooped for a closer examination. The form was of human
length, or rather more; but it was not finished, was neither divided
into legs below nor extended into arms at the roughly shaped shoulders.
The head, too, had been molded without features, though from either
side, where the ears should have been it sprouted up-curved horns like
a bison's. Lanark felt a chill creep upon him, whence he knew not.
"It's Satan's own image," Jager was mouthing deeply. "'Thou shalt not
make unto thee any graven image----'"
[Illustration: "It's Satan's own image," Jager was mouthing deeply.]
With one foot he turned the coffin-box upon its side. Lanark took a
quick stride backward, just in time to prevent the ruddy form from
dropping out upon his toes. A moment later, Jager had spurned the
thing. It broke, with a crashing sound like crockery, and two more
trampling kicks of the sergeant's heavy boots smashed it to bits.
"Stop!" cried Lanark, too late. "Why did you break it? I wanted to have
a good look at the thing."
"But it is not good for men to look upon the devil's works," responded
Jager, almost pontifically.
"Don't advise me, sergeant," said Lanark bleakly. "Remember that I am
your officer, and that I don't need instruction as to what I may look
at." He looked down at the fragments. "Hmm, the thing was hollow, and
quite brittle. It seems to have been stuffed with straw--no, excelsior.
Wood shavings, anyway." He investigated the fluffy inner mass with a
toe. "Hullo, there's something inside of the stuff."
"I wouldn't touch it, sir," warned Jager, but this time it was he who
spoke too late. Lanark's boot-toe had nudged the object into plain
sight, and Lanark had put down his gauntleted left hand and picked it
up.
"What is this?" he asked himself aloud. "Looks rather like some sort of
strong-box--foreign, I'd say, and quite cold. Come on, Jager, we'll go
upstairs."
In the kitchen, with a strong light from several candles, they
examined the find quite closely. It was a dark oblong, like a small
dispatch-case or, as Lanark had commented, a strong-box. Though as hard
as iron, it was not iron, nor any metal either of them had ever known.
"How does it open?" was Lanark's next question, turning the case over
in his hands. "It doesn't seem to have hinges on it. Is this the
lid--or this?"
"I couldn't say." Jager peered, his eyes growing narrow with
perplexity. "No hinges, as the lieutenant just said."
"None visible, nor yet a lock." Lanark thumped the box experimentally,
and proved it hollow. Then he lifted it close to his ear and shook
it. There was a faint rustle, as of papers loosely rolled or folded.
"Perhaps," the officer went on, "this separate slice isn't a lid at
all. There may be a spring to press, or something that slides back and
lets another plate come loose."
But Suggs was entering from the front of the house. "Lieutenant, sir!
Something's happened to Newton--he was watching on the rock. Will the
lieutenant come? And Sergeant Jager, too."
The suggestion of duty brought back the color and self-control that
Jager had lost. "What's happened to Newton?" he demanded at once, and
hurried away with Suggs.
Lanark waited in the kitchen for only a moment. He wanted to leave the
box, but did not want his troopers meddling with it. He spied, beside
the heavy iron stove, a fireplace, and in its side the metal door to
an old brick oven. He pulled that door open, thrust the box in, closed
the door again, and followed Suggs and Jager.
They had gone out upon the front porch. There, with Corporal Gray and a
blank-faced trooper on guard, lay the silent form of Newton, its face
covered with a newspaper.
Almost every man of the gathered patrol knew a corpse when he saw one,
and it took no second glance to know that Newton was quite dead.
_4. The Mandifers_
Jager, bending, lifted the newspaper and then dropped it back. He said
something that, for all his religiosity, might have been an oath.
"What's the matter, sergeant?" demanded Lanark.
Jager's brows were clamped in a tense frown, and his beard was actually
trembling. "His face, sir. It's terrible."
"A wound?" asked Lanark, and lifted the paper in turn. He, too,
let it fall back, and his exclamation of horror and amazement was
unquestionably profane.
"There ain't no wound on him, Lieutenant Lanark," offered Suggs,
pushing his wan, plump face to the forefront of the troopers. "We heard
Newton yell--heard him from the top of the rock yonder."
All eyes turned gingerly toward the promontory.
"That's right, sir," added Corporal Gray. "I'd just sent Newton up, to
relieve Josserand."
"You heard him yell," prompted Lanark. "Go on, what happened?"
"I hailed him back," said the corporal, "but he said nothing. So
I climbed up--that north side's the easiest to climb. Newton was
standing at the top, standing straight up with his carbine at the
ready. He must have been dead right then."
"You mean, he was struck somehow as you watched?"
Gray shook his head. "No, sir. I think he was dead as he stood up.
He didn't move or speak, and when I touched him he sort of coiled
down--like an empty coat falling off a clothes-line." Gray's hand made
a downward-floating gesture in illustration. "When I turned him over
I saw his face, all twisted and scared-looking, like--like what the
lieutenant has seen. And I sung out for Suggs and McSween to come up
and help me bring him down."
Lanark gazed at Newton's body. "He was looking which way?"
"Over yonder, eastward." Gray pointed unsteadily. "Like it might have
been beyond the draw and them trees in it."
Lanark and Jager peered into the waning light, that was now dusk. Jager
mumbled what Lanark had already been thinking--that Newton had died
without wounds, at or near the moment when the horned image had been
shattered upon the cellar floor.
Lanark nodded, and dismissed several vague but disturbing inspirations.
"You say he died standing up, Gray. Was he leaning on his gun?"
"No, sir. He stood on his two feet, and held his carbine at the ready.
Sounds impossible, a dead man standing up like that, but that's how it
was."
"Bring his blanket and cover him up," said Lanark. "Put a guard over
him, and we'll bury him tomorrow. Don't let any of the men look at his
face. We've got to give him some kind of funeral." He turned to Jager.
"Have you a prayer-book, sergeant?"
Jager had fished out the _Long Lost Friend_ volume. He was reading
something aloud, as though it were a prayer: "... and be and remain
with us on the water and upon the land," he pattered out. "May the
Eternal Godhead also----"
"Stop that heathen nonsense," Lanark almost roared. "You're supposed to
be an example to the men, sergeant. Put that book away."
Jager obeyed, his big face reproachful. "It was a spell against evil
spirits," he explained, and for a moment Lanark wished that he had
waited for the end. He shrugged and issued further orders.
"I want all the lamps lighted in the house, and perhaps a fire out here
in the yard," he told the men. "We'll keep guard both here and in that
gulley to the east. If there is a mystery, we'll solve it."
"Pardon me, sir," volunteered a well-bred voice, in which one felt
rather than heard the tiny touch of foreign accent. "I can solve the
mystery for you, though you may not thank me."
Two men had come into view, were drawing up beside the little knot of
troopers. How had they approached? Through the patroled brush of the
ravine? Around the corner of the house? Nobody had seen them coming,
and Lanark, at least, started violently. He glowered at this new enigma.
* * * * *
The man who had spoken paused at the foot of the porch steps, so
that lamplight shone upon him through the open front door. He was
skeleton-gaunt, in face and body, and even his bones were small. His
eyes burned forth from deep pits in his narrow, high skull, and his
clothing was that of a dandy of the forties. In his twig-like fingers
he clasped bunches of herbs.
His companion stood to one side in the shadow, and could be seen only
as a huge coarse lump of a man.
"I am Persil Mandifer," the thin creature introduced himself. "I came
here to gather from the gardens," and he held out his handfuls of
leaves and stalks. "You, sir, you are in command of these soldiers, are
you not? Then know that you are trespassing."
"The expediencies of war," replied Lanark easily, for he had seen Suggs
and Corporal Gray bring their carbines forward in their hands. "You'll
have to forgive our intrusion."
A scornful mouth opened in the emaciated face, and a soft, superior
chuckle made itself heard. "Oh, but this is not my estate. I am allowed
here, yes--but it is not mine. The real Master----" The gaunt figure
shrugged, and the voice paused for a moment. The bright eyes sought
Newton's body. "From what I see and what I heard as I came up to you,
there has been trouble. You have transgressed somehow, and have begun
to suffer."
"To you Southerners, all Union soldiers are trespassers and
transgressors," suggested Lanark, but the other laughed and shook his
fleshless white head.
"You misunderstand, I fear. I care nothing about this war, except
that I am amused to see so many people killed. I bear no part in it.
Of course, when I came to pluck herbs, and saw your sentry at the top
of Fearful Rock----" Persil Mandifer eyed again the corpse of Newton.
"There he lies, eh? It was my privilege and power to project a vision
up to him in his loneliness that, I think, put an end to his part of
this puerile strife."
Lanark's own face grew hard. "Mr. Mandifer," he said bleakly, "you seem
to be enjoying a quiet laugh at our expense. But I should point out
that we greatly outnumber you, and are armed. I'm greatly tempted to
place you under arrest."
"Then resist that temptation," advised Mandifer urbanely. "It might be
disastrous to you if we became enemies."
"Then be kind enough to explain what you're talking about," commanded
Lanark. Something swam into the forefront of his consciousness. "You
say that your name is Mandifer. We found a girl named Enid Mandifer
in the gulley yonder. She told us a very strange story. Are you her
stepfather? The one who mesmerized her and----"
"She talked to you?" Mandifer's soft voice suddenly shifted to a windy
roar that broke Lanark's questioning abruptly in two. "She came, and
did not make the sacrifice of herself? She shall expiate, sir, and you
with her!"
Lanark had had enough of this high-handed civilian's airs. He made
a motion with his left hand to Corporal Gray, whose carbine-barrel
glinted in the light from the house as it leveled itself at Mandifer's
skull-head.
"You're under arrest," Lanark informed the two men.
The bigger one growled, the first sound he had made. He threw his
enormous body forward in a sudden leaping stride, his gross hands
extended as though to clutch Lanark. Jager, at the lieutenant's side,
quickly drew his revolver and fired from the hip. The enormous body
fell, rolled over and subsided.
"You have killed my son!" shrieked Mandifer.
"Take hold of him, you two," ordered Lanark, and Suggs and Josserand
obeyed.
The gaunt form of Mandifer achieved one explosive struggle, then fell
tautly motionless with the big hands of the troopers upon his elbows.
"Thanks, Jager," continued Lanark. "That was done quickly and well.
Some of you drag this body up on the porch and cover it. Gray, tumble
upstairs and bring down that girl we found."
While waiting for the corporal to return, Lanark ordered further that
a bonfire be built to banish a patch of the deepening darkness. It was
beginning to shoot up its bright tongues as the corporal ushered Enid
Mandifer out upon the porch.
She had arranged her disordered clothing, had even contrived to put up
her hair somehow, loosely but attractively. The firelight brought out a
certain strength of line and angle in her face, and made her eyes shine
darkly. She was manifestly frightened at the sight of her stepfather
and the blanket-covered corpses to one side; but she faced determinedly
a flood of half-understandable invectives from the emaciated man. She
answered him, too; Lanark did not know what she meant by most of the
things she said, but gathered correctly that she was refusing, finally
and completely, to do something.
"Then I shall say no more," gritted out the spidery Mandifer, and his
bared teeth were of the flat, chalky white of long-dead bone. "I place
this matter in the hands of the Nameless One. He will not forgive, will
not forget."
* * * * *
Enid moved a step toward Lanark, who put out a hand and touched her
arm reassuringly. The mounting flame of the bonfire lighted up all
who watched and listened--the withered, glaring mummy that was Persil
Mandifer, the frightened but defiant shapeliness of Enid in her
flower-patterned gown, Lanark in his sudden attitude of protection,
the ring of troopers in their dusty blue blouses. With the half-lighted
front of the weathered old house like a stage set behind them, and
alternate red lights and sooty shadows playing over all, they might
have been a tableau in some highly melodramatic opera.
"Silence," Lanark was grating. "For the last time, Mr. Mandifer, let me
remind you that I have placed you under arrest. If you don't calm down
immediately and speak only when you're spoken to, I'll have my men tie
you flat to four stakes and put a gag in your mouth."
Mandifer subsided at once, just as he was on the point of hurling
another harsh threat at Enid.
"That's much better," said Lanark. "Sergeant Jager, it strikes me that
we'd better get our pickets out to guard this position."
Mandifer cleared his throat with actual diffidence. "Lieutenant
Lanark--that is your name, I gather," he said in the soft voice which
he had employed when he had first appeared. "Permit me, sir, to say but
two words." He peered as though to be sure of consent. "I have it in my
mind that it is too late, useless, to place any kind of guard against
surprise."
"What do you mean?" asked Lanark.
"It is all of a piece with your offending of him who owns this house
and the land which encompasses it," continued Mandifer. "I believe
that a body of your enemies, mounted men of the Southern forces, are
upon you. That man who died upon the brow of Fearful Rock might have
seen them coming, but he was brought down sightless and voiceless, and
nobody was assigned in his place."
He spoke truth. Gray, in his agitation, had not posted a fresh sentry.
Lanark drew his lips tight beneath his mustache.
"Once more you feel that it is a time to joke with us, Mr. Mandifer,"
he growled. "I have already suggested gagging you and staking you out."
"But listen," Mandifer urged him.
Suddenly hoofs thundered, men yelled a double-noted defiance, high and
savage--"_Yee-hee!_"
It was the rebel yell.
Quantrill's guerrillas rode out of the dark and upon them.
_5. Blood in the Night_
Neither Lanark nor the others remembered that they began to fight for
their lives; they only knew all at once that they were doing it. There
was a prolonged harsh rattle of gun-shots like a blast of hail upon
hard wood; Lanark, by chance or unconscious choice, snatched at and
drew his sword instead of his revolver.
A horse's flying shoulder struck him, throwing him backward but not
down. As he reeled to save his footing, he saved also his own life;
for the rider, a form all cascading black beard and slouch hat, thrust
a pistol almost into the lieutenant's face and fired. The flash was
blinding, the ball ripped Lanark's cheek like a whiplash, and then the
saber in his hand swung, like a scythe reaping wheat. By luck rather
than design, the edge bit the guerrilla's gun-wrist. Lanark saw the
hand fly away as though on wings, its fingers still clutching the
pistol, all agleam in the firelight. Blood gushed from the stump of the
rider's right arm, like water from a fountain, and Lanark felt upon
himself a spatter as of hot rain. He threw himself in, clutched the
man's legs with his free arm and, as the body sagged heavily from above
upon his head and shoulder, he heaved it clear out of the saddle.
The horse was plunging and whinnying, but Lanark clutched its
reins and got his foot into the stirrup. The bonfire seemed to be
growing strangely brighter, and the mounted guerrillas were plainly
discernible, raging and trampling among his disorganized men. Corporal
Gray went down, dying almost under Lanark's feet. Amid the deafening
drum-roll of shots, Sergeant Jager's bull-like voice could be heard:
"Stop, thieves and horsemen, in the name of God!" It sounded like an
exorcism, as though the Confederate raiders were devils.
Lanark had managed to climb into the saddle of his captured mount. He
dropped the bridle upon his pommel, reached across his belly with his
left hand, and dragged free his revolver. At a little distance, beyond
the tossing heads of several horses, he thought he saw the visage of
Quantrill, clean-shaven and fierce. He fired at it, but he had no faith
in his own left-handed snap-shooting. He felt the horse frantic and
unguided, shoving and striving against another horse. Quarters were too
close for a saber-stroke, and he fired again with his revolver. The
guerrilla spun out of the saddle. Lanark had a glimpse he would never
forget, of great bulging eyes and a sharp-pointed mustache.
Again the rebel yell, flying from mouth to bearded mouth, and then
an answering shout, deeper and more sustained; some troopers had run
out of the house and, standing on the porch, were firing with their
carbines. It was growing lighter, with a blue light. Lanark did not
understand that.
Quantrill did not understand it, either. He and Lanark had come almost
within striking distance of each other, but the guerrilla chief was
gazing past his enemy, in the direction of the house. His mouth was
open, with strain-lines around it. His eyes glowed. He feared what he
saw.
"Remember me, you thieving swine!" yelled Lanark, and tried to thrust
with his saber. But Quantrill had reined back and away, not from the
sword but from the light that was growing stronger and bluer. He
thundered an order, something that Lanark could not catch but which
the guerrillas understood and obeyed. Then Quantrill was fleeing. Some
guerrillas dashed between him and Lanark. They, too, were in flight.
All the guerrillas were in flight. Somebody roared in triumph and fired
with a carbine--it sounded like Sergeant Jager. The battle was over,
within moments of its beginning.
Lanark managed to catch his reins, in the tips of the fingers that held
his revolver, and brought the horse to a standstill before it followed
Quantrill's men into the dark. One of his own party caught and held the
bits, and Lanark dismounted. At last he had time to look at the house.
It was afire, every wall and sill and timber of it, burning all at
once, and completely. And it burnt deep blue, as though seen through
the glass of an old-fashioned bitters-bottle. It was falling to pieces
with the consuming heat, and they had to draw back from it. Lanark
stared around to reckon his losses.
Nearest the piazza lay three bodies, trampled and broken-looking. Some
men ran in and dragged them out of danger; they were Persil Mandifer,
badly battered by horses' feet, and the two who had held him, Josserand
and Lanark's orderly, Suggs. Both the troopers had been shot through
the head, probably at the first volley from the guerrillas.
Corporal Gray was stone-dead, with five or six bullets in him, and
three more troopers had been killed, while four were wounded, but not
critically. Jager, examining them, pronounced that they could all ride
if the lieutenant wished it.
"I wish it, all right," said Lanark ruefully. "We leave first thing in
the morning. Hmm, six dead and four hurt, not counting poor Newton,
who's there in the fire. Half my command--and, the way I forgot the
first principles of military vigilance, I don't deserve as much luck as
that. I think the burning house is what frightened the guerrillas. What
began it?"
Nobody knew. They had all been fighting too desperately to have any
idea. The three men who had been picketing the gulley, and who had
dashed back to assault the guerrillas on the flank, had seen the blue
flames burst out, as it were from a hundred places; that was the best
view anybody had.
"All the killing wasn't done by Quantrill," Jager comforted his
lieutenant. "Five dead guerrillas, sir--no, six. One was picked up a
little way off, where he'd been dragged by his foot in the stirrup.
Others got wounded, I'll be bound. Pretty even thing, all in all."
"And we still have one prisoner," supplemented Corporal Googan.
He jerked his head toward Enid Mandifer, who stood unhurt, unruffled
almost, gazing raptly at the great geyser of blue flame that had been
the house and temple of her stepfather's nameless deity.
* * * * *
It was a gray morning, and from the first streaks of it Sergeant Jager
had kept the unwounded troopers busy, making a trench-like grave
halfway between the spot where the house had stood and the gulley to
the east. When the bodies were counted again, there were only twelve;
Persil Mandifer's was missing, and the only explanation was that it had
been caught somehow in the flames. The ruins of the house, that still
smoked with a choking vapor as of sulfur gas, gave up a few crisped
bones that apparently had been Newton, the sentry who had died from
unknown causes; but no giant skeleton was found to remind one of the
passing of Persil Mandifer's son.
"No matter," said Lanark to Jager. "We know that they were both dead,
and past our worrying about. Put the other bodies in--our men at this
end, the guerrillas at the other."
The order was carried out. Once again Lanark asked about a prayer-book.
A lad by the name of Duckin said that he had owned one, but that it had
been burned with the rest of his kit in the blue flame that destroyed
the house.
"Then I'll have to do it from memory," decided Lanark.
He drew up the surviving ten men at the side of the trench. Jager took
a position beside him, and, just behind the sergeant, Enid Mandifer
stood.
Lanark self-consciously turned over his clutter of thoughts, searching
for odds and ends of his youthful religious teachings. "'Man that is
born of woman hath but short time to live, and is full of misery'," he
managed to repeat. "'He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower'."
As he said the words "cut down," he remembered his saber-stroke of the
night before, and how he had shorn away a man's hand. That man, with
his heavy black beard, lay in this trench before them, with the severed
hand under him. Lanark was barely able to beat down a shudder. "'In
the midst of life'," he went on, "'we are in death'."
There he was obliged to pause. Sergeant Jager, on inspiration, took one
pace forward and threw into the trench a handful of gritty earth.
"'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust'," remembered Lanark. "'Unto Almighty
God we commit these bodies'"--he was sure that that was a misquotation
worthy of Jager himself, and made shift to finish with one more tag
from his memory: "'... in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection
unto eternal life'."
He faced toward the file of men. Four of them had been told to fall in
under arms, and at his order they raised their carbines and fired a
volley into the air. After that, the trench was filled in.
Jager then cleared his throat and began to give orders concerning
horses, saddles and what possessions had been spared by the fire.
Lanark walked aside, and found Enid Mandifer keeping pace with him.
"You are going back to your army?" she asked.
"Yes, at once. I was sent here to see if I could find and damage
Quantrill's band. I found him, and gave at least as good as I got."
"Thank you," she said, "for everything you've done for me."
He smiled deprecatingly, and it hurt his bullet-burnt cheek.
"I did nothing," he protested, and both of them realized that it was
the truth. "All that has happened--it just happened."
He drew his eyes into narrow gashes, as if brooding over the past
twelve hours.
"I'm halfway inclined to believe what your stepfather said about a
supernatural influence here. But what about you, Miss Mandifer?"
She tried to smile in turn, not very successfully.
"I can go back to my home. I'll be alone there."
"Alone?"
"I have a few servants."
"You'll be safe?"
"As safe as anywhere."
He clasped his hands behind him. "I don't know how to say it, but I
have begun to feel responsible for you. I want to know that all will be
well."
"Thank you," she said a second time. "You owe me nothing."
"Perhaps not. We do not know each other. We have spoken together only
three or four times. Yet you will be in my mind. I want to make a
promise."
"Yes?"
They had paused in their little stroll, almost beside the newly filled
grave trench. Lanark was frowning, Enid Mandifer nervous and expectant.
"This war," he said weightily, "is going to last much longer than
people thought at first. We--the Union--have done pretty well in the
West here, but Lee is making fools of our generals back East. We may
have to fight for years, and even then we may not win."
"I hope, Mr.--I mean, Lieutenant Lanark," stammered the girl, "I hope
that you will live safely through it."
"I hope so, too. And if I am spared, if I am alive and well when peace
comes, I swear that I shall return to this place. I shall make sure
that you, too, are alive and well."
He finished, very certain that he could not have used stiffer, more
stupid words; but Enid Mandifer smiled now, radiantly and gratefully.
"I shall pray for you, Lieutenant Lanark. Now, your men are ready to
leave. Go, and I shall watch."
"No," he demurred. "Go yourself, get away from this dreadful place."
She bowed her head in assent, and walked quickly away. At some distance
she paused, turned, and waved her hand above her head.
Lanark took off his broad, black hat and waved in answer. Then he faced
about, strode smartly back into the yard beside the charred ruins.
Mounting his bay gelding, he gave the order to depart.
_6. Return_
It was spring again, the warm, bright spring of the year 1866, when
Kane Lanark rode again into the Fearful Rock country.
His horse was a roan gray this time; the bay gelding had been shot
under him, along with two other horses, during the hard-fought
three days at Westport, the "Gettysburg of the West," when a few
regulars and the Kansas militia turned back General Sterling Price's
raid through Missouri. Lanark had been a captain then, and a major
thereafter, leading a cavalry expedition into Kentucky. He narrowly
missed being in at the finish of Quantrill, whose death by the hand of
another he bitterly resented. Early in 1865 he was badly wounded in a
skirmish with Confederate horsemen under General Basil Duke. Thereafter
he could ride as well as ever, but when he walked he limped.
Lanark's uniform had been replaced by a soft hat and black frock coat,
his face was browner and his mustache thicker, and his cheek bore the
jaggedly healed scar of the guerrilla pistol-bullet. He was richer,
too; the death of his older brother, Captain Douglas Lanark of the
Confederate artillery, at Chancellorsville, had left him his father's
only heir. Yet he was recognizable as the young lieutenant who had
ridden into this district four years gone.
Approaching from the east instead of the north, he came upon the plain
with its grass-levels, its clumps of bushes and trees, from another
and lower point. Far away on the northward horizon rose a sharp little
finger; that would be Fearful Rock, on top of which Trooper Newton had
once died, horrified and unwounded. Now, then, which way would lie the
house he sought for? He idled his roan along the trail, and encountered
at last an aged, ragged Negro on a mule.
"Hello, uncle," Lanark greeted him, and they both reined up. "Which way
is the Mandifer place?"
"Mandifuh?" repeated the slow, high voice of the old man. "Mandifuh,
suh, cap'n? Ah doan know no Mandifuh."
"Nonsense, uncle," said Lanark, but without sharpness, for he liked
Negroes. "The Mandifer family has lived around here for years. Didn't
you ever know Mr. Persil Mandifer and his step-daughter, Miss Enid?"
"Puhsil Mandifuh?" It was plain that the old fellow had heard
and spoken the name before, else he would have stumbled over its
unfamiliarities. "No, suh, cap'n. Ah doan nevah heah tella such gemman."
Lanark gazed past the mule and its tattered rider. "Isn't that a little
house among those willows?"
The kinky head turned and peered. "Yes, suh, cap'n. Dat place b'long to
Pahson Jaguh."
"Who?" demanded Lanark, almost standing up in his stirrups in his
sudden interest. "Did you say Jager? What kind of man is he?"
"He jes a pahson--Yankee pahson," replied the Negro, a trifle nervous
at this display of excitement. "Big man, suh, got red face. He Yankee.
You ain' no Yankee, cap'n, suh. Whaffo you want Pahson Jaguh?"
"Never mind," said Lanark, and thrust a silver quarter into the
withered brown palm. He also handed over one of his long, fragrant
cheroots. "Thanks, uncle," he added briskly, then spurred his horse and
rode on past.
Reaching the patch of willows, he found that the trees formed an open
curve that faced the road, and that within this curve stood a rough
but snug-looking cabin, built of sawn, unpainted planks and home-split
shingles. Among the brush to the rear stood a smaller shed, apparently
a stable, and a pen for chickens or a pig. Lanark reined up in front,
swung out of his saddle, and tethered his horse to a thorny shrub at
the trail-side. As he drew tight the knot of the halter-rope, the door
of heavy boards opened with a creak. His old sergeant stepped into view.
Jager was a few pounds heavier, if anything, than when Lanark had last
seen him. His hair was longer, and his beard had grown to the center of
his broad chest. He wore blue jeans tucked into worn old cavalry boots,
a collarless checked shirt fastened with big brass studs, and leather
suspenders. He stared somewhat blankly as Lanark called him by name and
walked up to the doorstep, favoring his injured leg.
"It's Captain Lanark, isn't it?" Jager hazarded. "My eyes----" He
paused, fished in a hip pocket and produced steel-rimmed spectacles.
When he donned them, they appeared to aid his vision. "Indeed it is
Captain Lanark! Or Major Lanark--yes, you were promoted----"
"I'm Mr. Lanark now," smiled back the visitor. "The war's over, Jager.
Only this minute did I hear of you in the country. How does it happen
that you settled in this place?"
"Come in, sir." Jager pushed the door wide open, and ushered Lanark
into an unfinished front room, well lighted by windows on three
sides. "It's not a strange story," he went on as he brought forward
a well-mended wooden chair for the guest, and himself sat on a small
keg. "You will remember, sir, that the land hereabouts is under a most
unhallowed influence. When the war came to an end, I felt strong upon
me the call to another conflict--a crusade against evil." He turned up
his eyes, as though to subpoena the powers of heaven as witnesses to
his devotion. "I preach here, the gospels and the true godly life."
"What is your denomination?" asked Lanark.
Jager coughed, as though abashed. "To my sorrow, I am ordained of no
church; yet might this not be part of heaven's plan? I may be here to
lead a strong new movement against hell's legions."
* * * * *
Lanark nodded as though to agree with this surmise, and studied Jager
anew. There was nothing left in manner or speech to suggest that here
had been a fierce fighter and model soldier, but the old rude power was
not gone. Lanark then asked about the community, and learned that there
were but seven white families within a twenty-mile radius. To these
Jager habitually preached of a Sunday morning, at one farm home or
another, and in the afternoon he was wont to exhort the more numerous
Negroes.
Lanark had by now the opening for his important question. "What about
the Mandifer place? Remember the girl we met, and her stepfather?"
"Enid Mandifer!" breathed Jager huskily, and his right hand fluttered
up. Lanark remembered that Jager had once assured him that not only
Catholics warded off evil with the sign of the cross.
"Yes, Enid Mandifer." Lanark leaned forward. "Long ago, Jager, I made a
promise that I would come and make sure that she prospered. Just now I
met an old Negro who swore that he had never heard the name."
Jager began to talk, steadily but with a sort of breathless awe, about
what went on in the Fearful Rock country. It was not merely that men
died--the death of men was not sufficient to horrify folk around whom
a war had raged. But corpses, when found, held grimaces that nobody
cared to look upon, and no blood remained in their bodies. Cattle,
too, had been slain, mangled dreadfully--perhaps by the strange,
unidentifiable creatures that prowled by moonlight and chattered in
voices that sounded human. One farmer of the vicinity, who had ridden
with Quantrill, had twice met strollers after dusk, and had recognized
them for comrades whom he knew to be dead.
"And the center of this devil's business," concluded Jager, "is the
farm that belonged to Persil Mandifer." He drew a deep, tired-sounding
breath. "As the desert is the habitation of dragons, so is it with
that farm. No trees live, and no grass. From a distance, one can see a
woman. It is Enid Mandifer."
"Where is the place?" asked Lanark directly.
Jager looked at him for long moments without answering. When he did
speak, it was an effort to change the subject. "You will eat here with
me at noon," he said. "I have a Negro servant, and he is a good cook."
"I ate a very late breakfast at a farmhouse east of here," Lanark put
him off. Then he repeated, "Where is the Mandifer place?"
"Let me speak this once," Jager temporized. "As you have said, we are
no longer at war--no longer officer and man. We are equals, and I am
able to refuse to guide you."
Lanark got up from his chair. "That is true, but you will not be acting
the part of a friend."
"I will tell you the way, on one condition." Jager's eyes and voice
pleaded. "Say that you will return to this house for supper and a bed,
and that you will be within my door by sundown."
"All right," said Lanark. "I agree. Now, which way does that farm lie?"
Jager led him to the door. He pointed. "This trail joins a road beyond,
an old road that is seldom used. Turn north upon it, and you will come
to a part which is grown up in weeds. Nobody passes that way. Follow
on until you find an old house, built low, with the earth dry and bare
around it. That is the dwelling-place of Enid Mandifer."
Lanark found himself biting his lip. He started to step across the
threshold, but Jager put a detaining hand on his arm. "Carry this as
you go."
He was holding out a little book with a gray paper cover. It had seen
usage and trouble since last Lanark had noticed it in Jager's hands;
its back was mended with a pasted strip of dark cloth, and its edges
were frayed and gnawed-looking, as though rats had been at it. But the
front cover still said plainly:
John George Hohman's
POW-WOWS
Or
LONG LOST FRIEND
"Carry this," said Jager again, and then quoted glibly: "'Whoever
carries this book with him is safe from all his enemies, visible or
invisible; and whoever has this book with him cannot die without the
holy corpse of Jesus Christ, nor drown in any water, nor burn up in any
fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him.'"
Lanark grinned in spite of himself and his new concern. "Is this the
kind of a protection that a minister of God should offer me?" he
inquired, half jokingly.
"I have told you long ago that the _Long Lost Friend_ is a good book,
and a blessed one." Jager thrust it into Lanark's right-hand coat
pocket. His guest let it remain, and held out his own hand in friendly
termination of the visit.
"Good-bye," said Lanark. "I'll come back before sundown, if that will
please you."
He limped out to his horse, untied it and mounted. Then, following
Jager's instructions, he rode forward until he reached the old road,
turned north and proceeded past the point where weeds had covered the
unused surface. Before the sun had fallen far in the sky, he was come
to his destination.
It was a squat, spacious house, the bricks of its trimming weathered
and the dark brown paint of its timbers beginning to crack. Behind
it stood unrepaired stables, seemingly empty. In the yard stood what
had been wide-branched trees, now leafless and lean as skeleton paws
held up to a relentless heaven. And there was no grass. The earth was
utterly sterile and hard, as though rain had not fallen since the
beginning of time.
Enid Mandifer had been watching him from the open door. When she saw
that his eyes had found her, she called him by name.
_7. The Rock Again_
Then there was silence. Lanark sat his tired roan and gazed at Enid,
rather hungrily, but only a segment of his attention was for her.
The silence crowded in upon him. His unconscious awareness grew
conscious--conscious of that blunt, pure absence of sound. There was no
twitter of birds, no hum of insects. Not a breath of wind stirred in
the leafless branches of the trees. Not even echoes came from afar. The
air was dead, as water is dead in a still, stale pond.
He dismounted then, and the creak of his saddle and the scrape of
his boot-sole upon the bald earth came sharp and shocking to his
quiet-filled ears. A hitching-rail stood there, old-seeming to be in so
new a country as this. Lanark tethered his horse, pausing to touch its
nose reassuringly--it, too, felt uneasy in the thick silence. Then he
limped up a gravel-faced path and stepped upon a porch that rang to his
feet like a great drum.
Enid Mandifer came through the door and closed it behind her. Plainly
she did not want him to come inside. She was dressed in brown alpaca,
high-necked, long-sleeved, tight above the waist and voluminous below.
Otherwise she looked exactly as she had looked when she bade him
good-bye beside the ravine, even to the strained, sleepless look that
made sorrowful her fine oval face.
"Here I am," said Lanark. "I promised that I'd come, you remember."
She was gazing into his eyes, as though she hoped to discover something
there. "You came," she replied, "because you could not rest in another
part of the country."
"That's right," he nodded, and smiled, but she did not smile back.
"We are doomed, all of us," she went on, in a low voice. "Mr.
Jager--the big man who was one of your soldiers----"
"I know. He lives not far from here."
"Yes. He, too, had to return. And I live--here." She lifted her hands a
trifle, in hopeless inclusion of the dreary scene. "I wonder why I do
not run away, or why, remaining, I do not go mad. But I do neither."
"Tell me," he urged, and touched her elbow. She let him take her arm
and lead her from the porch into the yard that was like a surface of
tile. The spring sun comforted them, and he knew that it had been cold,
so near to the closed front door of Persil Mandifer's old house.
She moved with him to a little rustic bench under one of the dead
trees. Still holding her by the arm, he could feel at the tips of his
fingers the shock of her footfalls, as though she trod stiffly. She, in
turn, quite evidently was aware of his limp, and felt distress; but,
tactfully, she did not inquire about it. When they sat down together,
she spoke.
"When I came home that day," she began, "I made a hunt through all of
my stepfather's desks and cupboards. I found many papers, but nothing
that told me of the things that so shocked us both. I did find money, a
small chest filled with French and American gold coins. In the evening
I called the slaves together and told them that their master and his
son were dead.
"Next morning, when I wakened, I found that every slave had run off,
except one old woman. She, nearly a hundred years old and very feeble,
told me that fear had come to them in the night, and that they had run
like rabbits. With them had gone the horses, and all but one cow."
"They deserted you!" cried Lanark hotly.
"If they truly felt the fear that came here to make its
dwelling-place!" Enid Mandifer smiled sadly, as if in forgiveness
of the fugitives. "But to resume; the old aunty and I made out here
somehow. The war went on, but it seemed far away; and indeed it was far
away. We watched the grass die before June, the leaves fall, the beauty
of this place vanish."
"I am wondering about that death of grass and leaves," put in Lanark.
"You connect it, somehow, with the unholiness at Fearful Rock; yet
things grow there."
"Nobody is being punished there," she reminded succinctly. "Well, we
had the chickens and the cow, but no crops would grow. If they had, we
needed hands to farm them. Last winter aunty died, too. I buried her
myself, in the back yard."
"With nobody to help you?"
"I found out that nobody cared or dared to help." Enid said that very
slowly, and did not elaborate upon it. "One Negro, who lives down the
road a mile, has had some mercy. When I need anything, I carry one of
my gold pieces to him. He buys for me, and in a day or so I seek him
out and get whatever it is. He keeps the change for his trouble."
Lanark, who had thought it cold upon the porch of the house, now mopped
his brow as though it were a day in August. "You must leave here," he
said.
"I have no place to go," she replied, "and if I had I would not dare."
"You would not dare?" he echoed uncomprehendingly.
"I must tell you something else. It is that my stepfather and
Larue--his son--are still here."
"What do you mean? They were killed," Lanark protested. "I saw them
fall. I myself examined their bodies."
"They were killed, yes. But they are here, perhaps within earshot."
It was his turn to gaze searchingly into her eyes. He looked for
madness, but he found none. She was apparently sane and truthful.
"I do not see them," she was saying, "or, at most, I see only their
sliding shadows in the evening. But I know of them, just around a
corner or behind a chair. Have you never known and recognized someone
just behind you, before you looked? Sometimes they sneer or smile. Have
you," she asked, "ever felt someone smiling at you, even though you
could not see him?"
Lanark knew what she meant. "But stop and think," he urged, trying
to hearten her, "that nothing has happened to you--nothing too
dreadful--although so much was promised when you failed to go through
with that ceremony."
She smiled, very thinly. "You think that nothing has happened to me?
You do not know the curse of living here, alone and haunted. You do
not understand the sense I have of something tightening and thickening
about me; tightening and thickening inside of me, too." Her hand
touched her breast, and trembled. "I have said that I have not gone
mad. That does not mean that I shall never go mad."
"Do not be resigned to any such idea," said Lanark, almost roughly, so
earnest was he in trying to win her from the thought.
"Madness may come--in the good time of those who may wish it. My mind
will die. And things will feed upon it, as buzzards would feed upon my
dead body."
* * * * *
Her thin smile faded away. Lanark felt his throat growing as dry as
lime, and cleared it noisily. Silence was still dense around them. He
asked her, quite formally, what she found to do.
"My stepfather had many books, most of them old," was her answer. "At
night I light one lamp--I must husband my oil--and sit well within its
circle of light. Nothing ever comes into that circle. And I read books.
Every night I read also a chapter from a Bible that belonged to my old
aunty. When I sleep, I hold that Bible against my heart."
He rose nervously, and she rose with him. "Must you go so soon?" she
asked, like a courteous hostess.
Lanark bit his mustache. "Enid Mandifer, come out of here with me."
"I can't."
"You can. You shall. My horse will carry both of us."
She shook her head, and the smile was back, sad and tender this time.
"Perhaps you cannot understand, and I know that I cannot tell you. But
if I stay here, the evil stays here with me. If I go, it will follow
and infect the world. Go away alone."
She meant it, and he did not know what to say or do.
"I shall go," he agreed finally, with an air of bafflement, "but I
shall be back."
Suddenly he kissed her. Then he turned and limped rapidly away, raging
at the feeling of defeat that had him by the back of the neck. Then, as
he reached his horse he found himself glad to be leaving the spot, even
though Enid Mandifer remained behind, alone. He cursed with a vehemence
that made the roan flinch, untied the halter and mounted. Away he rode,
to the magnified clatter of hoofs. He looked back, not once but several
times. Each time he saw Enid Mandifer, smaller and smaller, standing
beside the bench under the naked tree. She was gazing, not along the
road after him, but at the spot where he had mounted his horse. It was
as though he had vanished from her sight at that point.
Lanark damned himself as one who retreated before an enemy, but he felt
that it was not as simple as that. Helplessness, not fear, had routed
him. He was leaving Enid Mandifer, but again he promised in his heart
to return.
[Illustration: "He was leaving Enid Mandifer, but he promised in his
heart to return."]
Somewhere along the weed-teemed road, the silence fell from him like a
heavy garment slipping away, and the world hummed and sighed again.
After some time he drew rein and fumbled in his saddlebag. He had lied
to Jager about his late breakfast, and now he was grown hungry. His
fingers touched and drew out two hardtacks--they were plentiful and
cheap, so recently was the war finished and the army demobilized--and
a bit of raw bacon. He sandwiched the streaky smoked flesh between the
big square crackers and ate without dismounting. Often, he considered,
he had been content with worse fare. Then his thoughts went to the
place he had quitted, the girl he had left there. Finally he skimmed
the horizon with his eye.
To north and east he saw the spire of Fearful Rock, like a dark
threatening finger lifted against him. The challenge of it was too much
to ignore.
He turned his horse off the road and headed in that direction. It was
a longer journey than he had thought, perhaps because he had to ride
slowly through some dark swamp-ground with a smell of rotten grass
about it. When he came near enough, he slanted his course to the east,
and so came to the point from which he first approached the rock and
the house that had then stood in its shadow.
A crow flapped overhead, cawing lonesomely. Lanark's horse seemed to
falter in its stride, as though it had seen a snake on the path, and
he had to spur it along toward its destination. He could make out the
inequalities of the rock, as clearly as though they had been sketched
in with a pen, and the new spring greenery of the brush and trees in
the gulley beyond to the westward; but the tumbledown ruins of the
house were somehow blurred, as though a gray mist or cloud hung there.
Lanark wished that his old command rode with him, at least that he had
coaxed Jager along; but he was close to the spot now, and would go in,
however uneasily, for a closer look.
The roan stopped suddenly, and Lanark's spur made it sidle without
advancing. He scolded it in an undertone, slid out of the saddle and
threaded his left arm through the reins. Pulling the beast along, he
limped toward the spot where the house had once stood.
The sun seemed to be going down.
_8. The Grapple by the Grave_
Lanark stumped for a furlong or more, to the yard of the old house, and
the horse followed unwillingly--so unwillingly that had there been a
tree or a stump at hand, Lanark would have tethered and left it. When
he paused at last, under the lee of the great natural obelisk that
was Fearful Rock, the twilight was upon him. Yet he could see pretty
plainly the collapsed, blackened ruins of the dwelling that four years
gone had burned before his eyes in devil-blue flame.
He came close to the brink of the foundation-hollow, and gazed narrowly
into it. Part of the chimney still stood, broken off at about a level
with the surface of the ground, the rubbish that had been its upper
part lying in jagged heaps about its base. Chill seemed to rise from
that littered depression, something like the chill he had guessed
at rather than felt when he had faced Enid Mandifer upon her porch.
The chill came slowly, almost stealthily, about his legs and thighs,
creeping snake-like under his clothing to tingle the skin upon his
belly. He shuddered despite himself, and the roan nuzzled his shoulder
in sympathy. Lanark lifted a hand and stroked the beast's cheek, then
moved back from where the house had stood.
He gazed westward, in the direction of the gulley. There, midway
between the foundation-hollow and the natural one, was a much smaller
opening in the earth, a pit filled with shadow. He remembered ordering
a grave dug there, a grave for twelve men. Well, it seemed to be open
now, or partially open.
He plodded toward it, reached it and gazed down in the fading light. He
judged that the dead of his own command still lay where their comrades
had put them, in a close row of six toward the east. It was the
westward end of the trench that had been dug up, the place where the
guerrillas had been laid. Perhaps the burial had been spied upon, and
the Southerners had returned to recover their fallen friends.
Yet there was something below there, something pallid and
flabby-looking. Lanark had come to make sure of things, and he stooped,
then climbed down, favoring his old wound. It was darker in the ditch
than above; yet he judged by the looseness of earth under his feet that
in one spot, at least, there had been fresh digging--or, perhaps, some
other person walking and examining. And the pallid patch was in reality
two pallid patches, like discarded cloaks or jackets. Still holding the
end of his horse's bridle, he put down his free hand to investigate.
Human hair tickled his fingers, and he snatched them back with an
exclamation. Then he dug in his pocket, brought out a match, and
snapped it aglow on the edge of his thumbnail.
He gazed downward for a full second before he dropped the light. It
went out before it touched the bottom of the hole. But Lanark had seen
enough.
Two human skins lay there--white, empty human skins. The legs of
them sprawled like discarded court stockings, the hands of them like
forgotten gauntlets. And tousled hair covered the collapsed heads of
them....
He felt light-headed and sick. Frantically he struggled up out of that
grave, and barely had he come to his knees on the ground above, when
his horse snorted and jerked its bridle free from his grasp. Lanark
sprang up, tingling all over. Across the trench, black and broad, stood
a human--or semi-human--figure.
Lanark felt a certain draining cold at cheek and brow. Yet his voice
was steady as he spoke, challengingly:
"What do you want?"
The creature opposite stooped, then bent its thick legs. It was going
to jump across the ditch. Lanark took a quick backward step toward his
horse--an old Colt's revolver was tucked into his right saddlebag.
But the sudden move on his part was too much for the jangled nerves of
the beast. It whickered, squealed, and jerked around. A moment later it
bolted away toward the east.
At the same time, the form on the other side of the open grave lunged
forward, cleared the space, and came at Lanark.
But it was attacking one who had been in close fights before, and
emerged the victor. Lanark, though partially a cripple, had lost
nothing of a cavalryman's toughness and resolution. He sprang backward,
let his assailant's charge slow before it reached him, then lashed out
with his left fist. His gloved knuckles touched soft flesh at what
seemed to be the side of the face, flesh that gave under them. Lanark
brought over his right, missed with it, and fell violently against the
body of the other. For a moment he smelled corruption, and then found
his feet and retreated again.
* * * * *
The black shape drew itself stoopingly down, as though to muster and
concentrate its volume of vigor. It launched itself at Lanark's legs,
with two arms extended. The veteran tried to dodge again, this time
sidewise, but his lameness made him slow. Hands reached and fastened
upon him, one clutching his thigh, the other clawing at the left-hand
pocket of his coat.
But in the moment of capture, the foul-smelling thing seemed to shudder
and snatch itself away, as though the touch of Lanark had burned
it. A moan came from somewhere in its direction. The crouched body
straightened, the arms lifted in cringing protection of the face.
Lanark, mystified but desperately glad, himself advanced to the attack.
As he came close he threw his weight. It bowled the other backward and
over, and he fell hard upon it. His own hands, sinewy and sure, groped
quickly upon dank, sticky-seeming garments, found a rumpled collar and
then a throat.
That throat appeared to be muddy, or at any rate slippery and foul.
With an effort Lanark sank his fingertips into it, throttling grimly
and with honest intention to kill. There was no resistance, only a
quivering of the body under his knee. The arms that screened the face
fell quivering away to either side. At that moment a bright moon
shimmered from behind a passing veil of cloud. Lanark gazed down into
the face of his enemy.
A puffy, livid, filth-clotted face--but he knew it. Those spiked
mustaches, those bulging eyes, the shape, contour and complexion....
"You're one of Quantrill's----" accused Lanark between clenched teeth.
Then his voice blocked itself, and his hands jerked away from their
strangle hold. His mouth gaped open.
"_I killed you once!_" he cried.
Between him and the body he had pinned down there drifted a wild
whirl of vision. He saw again the fight in the blue fireglow, the
assailant who spurred against him, the flash of his own revolver,
the limp collapse of the other. He saw, too, the burial next
morning--blue-coated troopers shoveling loam down upon a silent row of
figures; and, ere clods hid it, a face peeping through a disarranged
blanket, a face with staring eyes and mustaches like twin knife-points.
Then his eyes were clear again, and he was on his feet and running. His
stiff leg gave him pain, but he slackened speed no whit. Once he looked
back. A strange blueness, like a dim reflection of the fire long ago,
hung around the base of Fearful Rock. In the midst of it, he saw not
one but several figures. They were not moving--not walking, anyway--but
he could swear that they gazed after him.
Something tripped him, a root or a fallen branch. He rose, neither
quickly nor confidently, aching in all his limbs. The moon had come
up, he took time to realize. Then he suddenly turned dizzy and faint
all over, as never in any battle he had seen, not even Pea Ridge and
Westport; for something bulky and dark was moving toward and against
him.
Then it whinnied softly, and his heart stole down from his throat--it
was his runaway horse.
Lanark was fain to stand for long seconds, with his arm across the
saddle, before he mounted. Then he turned the animal's head southward
and shook the bridle to make it walk. At last he was able to examine
himself for injuries.
Though winded, he was not bruised or hurt, but he was covered with
earth and mold, and his side pocket had been almost ripped from his
coat. That had happened when the--the creature yonder had tried
to grapple him. He wondered how it had been forced to retreat so
suddenly. He put his hand in the pocket.
He touched a little book there, and drew it forth.
It was Jager's _Long Lost Friend_.
A good hour later, Lanark rode into the yard of his ex-sergeant. The
moon was high, and Jager was sitting upon the front stoop.
Silently the owner of the little house rose, took Lanark's bridle rein
and held the horse while Lanark dismounted. Then he led the beast
around to the rear yard, where the little shed stood. In front of this
he helped Lanark unbridle and unsaddle the roan.
A Negro boy appeared, diffident in his mute offer of help, and Jager
directed him to rub the beast down with a wisp of hay before giving it
water or grain. Then he led Lanark to the front of the house.
Jager spoke at the threshold: "I thank God you are come back safely."
_9. Debate and Decision_
Jager's Negro servant was quite as good a cook as promised. Lanark,
eating chicken stew and biscuits, reflected that only twice before had
he been so ravenous--upon receiving the news of Lee's surrender at
Appomatox, and after the funeral of his mother. When he had finished,
he drew forth a cheroot. His hand shook as he lighted it. Jager gave
him one of the old looks of respectful disapproval, but did not
comment. Instead he led Lanark to the most comfortable chair in the
parlor and seated himself upon the keg. Then he said: "Tell me."
Lanark told him, rather less coherently than here set down, the
adventures of the evening. Again and again he groped in his mind for
explanations, but not once found any to offer.
"It is fit for the devil," pronounced Jager when his old commander had
finished. "Did I not say that you should have stayed away from that
woman? You're well out of the business."
"I'm well into it, you mean," Lanark fairly snapped back. "What can you
think of me, Jager, when you suggest that I might let things stand as
they are?"
The frontier preacher massaged his shaggy jowl with thoughtful
knuckles. "You have been a man of war and an officer of death," he
said heavily. "God taught your hands to fight. Yet your enemies are
not those who perish by the sword." He held out his hand. "You say you
still have the book I lent you?"
From his torn pocket Lanark drew Hohman's _Long Lost Friend_. Jager
took it and stared at the cover. "The marks of fingers," he muttered,
in something like awe. He examined the smudges closely, putting on his
spectacles to do so, then lifted the book to his nose. His nostrils
wrinkled, as if in distaste, and he passed the thing back. "Smell it,"
he directed.
Lanark did so. About the slimy-looking prints on the cover hung a
sickening odor of decayed flesh.
"The demon that attacked you, that touched this book, died long ago,"
went on Jager. "You know as much--you killed him with your own hand.
Yet he fights you this very night."
"Maybe you have a suggestion," Lanark flung out, impatient at the
assured and almost snobbish air of mystery that colored the manner
of his old comrade in arms. "If this is a piece of hell broke loose,
perhaps you did the breaking. Remember that image--that idol-thing with
horns--that you smashed in the cellar? You probably freed all the evil
upon the world when you did that."
Jager frowned, but pursued his lecture. "This very book, this _Long
Lost Friend_, saved you from the demon's clutch," he said. "It is a
notable talisman and shield. But with the shield one must have a sword,
with which to attack in turn."
"All right," challenged Lanark. "Where is your sword?"
"It is a product of a mighty pen," Jager informed him sententiously. He
turned in his seat and drew from a box against the wall a book. Like
the _Long Lost Friend_, it was bound in paper, but of a cream color.
Its title stood forth in bold black letters:
THE SECRETS
OF
ALBERTUS MAGNUS
"A translation from the German and the Latin," explained Jager.
"Printed, I think, in New York. This book is full of wisdom, although I
wonder if it is evil, unlawful wisdom."
"I don't care if it is." Lanark almost snatched the book. "Any weapon
must be used. And I doubt if Albertus Magnus was evil. Wasn't he a
churchman, and didn't he teach Saint Thomas Aquinas?" He leafed through
the beginning of the book. "Here's a charm, Jager, to be spoken in the
name of God. That doesn't sound unholy."
"Satan can recite scripture to his own ends," misquoted Jager. "I don't
remember who said that, but----"
"Shakespeare said it, or something very like it," Lanark informed him.
"Look here, Jager, farther on. Here's a spell against witchcraft and
evil spirits."
"I have counted at least thirty such in that book," responded the
other. "Are you coming to believe in them, sir?"
Lanark looked up from the page. His face was earnest and, in a way,
humble.
"I'm constrained to believe in many unbelievable things. If my
experience tonight truly befell me, then I must believe in charms of
safety. Supernatural evil like that must have its contrary supernatural
good."
Jager pushed his spectacles up on his forehead and smiled in his beard.
"I have heard it told," he said, "that charms and spells work only when
one believes in them."
"You sound confident of that, at least," Lanark smiled back. "Maybe you
will help me, after all."
"Maybe I will."
The two gazed into each other's eyes, and then their hands came out, at
the same moment. Lanark's lean fingers crushed Jager's coarser ones.
"Let's be gone," urged Lanark at once, but the preacher shook his head
emphatically.
"Slowly, slowly," he temporized. "Cool your spirit, and take council.
He that ruleth his temper is greater than he that taketh a city." Once
more he put out his hand for the cream-colored volume of Albertus
Magnus, and began to search through it.
"Do you think to comfort me from that book?" asked Lanark.
"It has more than comfort," Jager assured him. "It has guidance." He
found what he was looking for, pulled down his spectacles again, and
read aloud:
"'Two wicked eyes have overshadowed me, but three other eyes are
overshadowing me--the one of God the Father, the second of God the Son,
the third of God the Holy Spirit; they watch my body and soul, my blood
and bone; I shall be protected in the name of God.'"
His voice was that of a prayerful man reading Scripture, and Lanark
felt moved despite himself. Jager closed the book gently and kept it in
his hand.
"Albertus Magnus has many such charms and assurances," he volunteered.
"In this small book, less than two hundred pages, I find a score and
more of ways for punishing and thwarting evil spirits, or those who
summon evil spirits." He shook his head, as if in sudden wrath, and
turned up his spectacled eyes. "O Lord!" he muttered. "How long must
devils plague us for our sins?"
Growing calmer once more, he read again from the book of Albertus
Magnus. There was a recipe for invisibility, which involved the making
of a thumbstall from the ear of a black cat boiled in the milk of
a black cow; an invocation to "Bedgoblin and all ye evil spirits";
several strange rituals, similar to those Lanark remembered from the
_Long Lost Friend_, to render one immune to wounds received in battle;
and a rime to speak while cutting and preparing a forked stick of hazel
to use in hunting for water or treasure. As a boy, Lanark had once seen
water "witched," and now he wondered if the rod-bearer had gained his
knowledge from Albertus Magnus.
"'Take an earthen pot, not glazed,'" Jager was reading on, "'and yarn
spun by a girl not seven years old'----"
* * * * *
He broke off abruptly, with a little inarticulate gasp. The book
slammed shut between his hands. His eyes were bright and hot, and his
face pale to the roots of his beard. When he spoke, it was in a hoarse
whisper:
"That was a spell to control witches, in the name of Lucifer, king of
hell. Didn't I say that this book was evil?"
"You must forget that," Lanark counseled him soberly. "I will admit
that the book might cause sorrow and wickedness, if it were in wicked
hands; but I do not think that you are anything but a good man."
"Thank you," said Jager simply. He rose and went to his table, then
returned with an iron inkpot and a stump of a pen. "Let me have your
right hand."
Lanark held out his palm, as though to a fortune-teller. Upon the skin
Jager traced slowly, in heavy capital letters, a square of five words:
S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S
Under this, very boldly, three crosses:
X X X
"A charm," the preacher told Lanark as he labored with the pen. "These
mystic words and the crosses will defend you in your slumber, from all
wicked spirits. So says Albertus Magnus, and Hohman as well."
"What do they mean?"
"I do not know that." Jager blew hotly upon Lanark's palm to dry the
ink. "Will you now write the same thing for me, in my right hand?"
"If you wish." Lanark, in turn, dipped in the inkpot and began to copy
the diagram. "_Opera_ is a word I know," he observed, "and _tenet_ is
another. _Sator_ may be some form of the old pagan word, _satyr_--a
kind of horned human monster----"
He finished the work in silence. Then he lighted another cigar. His
hand was as steady as a gun-rest this time, and the match did not even
flicker in his fingertips. He felt somehow stronger, better, more
confident.
"You'll give me a place to sleep for the night?" he suggested.
"Yes. I have only pallets, but you and I have slept on harder couches
before this."
Within half an hour both men were sound asleep.
_10. Enid Mandifer Again_
The silence was not so deadly the following noon as Lanark and Jager
dismounted at the hitching-rack in front of Enid Mandifer's; perhaps
this was because there were two horses to stamp and snort, two bridles
to jingle, two saddles to creak, two pairs of boots to spurn the
pathway toward the door.
Enid Mandifer, with a home-sewn sunbonnet of calico upon her head, came
around the side of the house just as the two men were about to step
upon the porch. She called out to them, anxiously polite, and stood
with one hand clutched upon her wide skirt of brown alpaca.
"Mr. Lanark," she ventured, "I hoped that you would come again. I have
something to show you."
It was Jager who spoke in reply: "Miss Mandifer, perhaps you may
remember me. I'm Parson Jager, I live south of here. Look." He held out
something--the _Long Lost Friend_ book. "Did you ever see anything of
this sort?"
She took it without hesitation, gazing interestedly at the cover.
Lanark saw her soft pink lips move, silently framing the odd words
of the title. Then she opened it and studied the first page. After a
moment she turned several leaves, and a little frown of perplexity
touched her bonnet-shaded brow. "These are receipts--recipes--of some
kind," she said slowly. "Why do you show them to me, Mr. Jager?"
The ex-sergeant had been watching her closely, his hands upon his heavy
hips, his beard thrust forward and his head tilted back. He put forth
his hand and received back the _Long Lost Friend_.
"Excuse me, Miss Mandifer, if I have suspected you unjustly," he said,
handsomely if cryptically. Then he glanced sidewise at Lanark, as
though to refresh a memory that needed no refreshing--a memory of a
living-dead horror that had recoiled at very touch of the little volume.
Enid Mandifer was speaking once more: "Mr. Lanark, I had a dreadful
night after you left. Dreams ... or maybe not dreams. I felt things
come and stand by my bed. This morning, on a bit of paper that lay on
the floor----"
From a pocket in the folds of her skirt, she produced a white scrap.
Lanark accepted it from her. Jager came close to look.
"Writing," growled Jager. "In what language is that?"
"It's English," pronounced Lanark, "but set down backward--from right
to left, as Leonardo da Vinci wrote."
The young woman nodded eagerly at this, as though to say that she had
already seen as much.
"Have you a mirror?" Jager asked her, then came to a simpler solution.
He took the paper and held it up to the light, written side away from
him. "Now it shows through," he announced. "Will one of you try to
read? I haven't my glasses with me."
Lanark squinted and made shift to read:
"'Any man may look lightly into heaven, to the highest star; but who
dares require of the bowels of Earth their abysmal secrets?'"
"That is my stepfather's handwriting," whispered Enid, her head close
to Lanark's shoulder.
He read on: "'The rewards of Good are unproven; but the revenges of
Evil are great, and manifest on all sides. Fear will always vanquish
love.'"
He grinned slightly, harshly. Jager remembered having seen that grin in
the old army days, before a battle.
"I think we're being warned," Lanark said to his old sergeant. "It's a
challenge, meant to frighten us. But challenges have always drawn me."
"I can't believe," said Enid, "that fear will vanquish love." She
blushed suddenly and rosily, as if embarrassed by her own words. "That
is probably beside the point," she resumed. "What I began to say was
that the sight of my stepfather's writing--why is it reversed like
that?--the sight, anyway, has brought things back into my mind."
"What things?" Jager demanded eagerly. "Come into the house, Miss
Mandifer, and tell us."
"Oh, not into the house," she demurred at once. "It's dark in
there--damp and cold. Let's go out here, to the seat under the tree."
She conducted them to the bench whither Lanark had accompanied her the
day before.
"Now," Jager prompted her, and she began:
"I remember of hearing him, when I was a child, as he talked to his
son Larue and they thought I did not listen or did not comprehend. He
told of these very things, these views he has written. He said, as if
teaching Larue, 'Fear is stronger than love; where love can but plead,
fear can command.'"
"A devil's doctrine!" grunted Jager, and Lanark nodded agreement.
"He said more," went on Enid. "He spoke of 'Those Below,' and of how
they 'rule by fear, and therefore are stronger than Those on High, who
rule by weak love.'"
"Blasphemy," commented Jager, in his beard.
"Those statements fit what I remember of his talk," Lanark put in. "He
spoke, just before we fought the guerrillas, of some great evil to come
from flouting Those Below."
"I remember," nodded Jager. "Go on, young woman."
"Then there was the box."
"The box?" repeated both men quickly.
"Yes. It was a small case, of dark gray metal, or stone--or something.
This, too, was when I was little. He offered it to Larue, and laughed
when Larue could not open it."
Jager and Lanark darted looks at each other. They were remembering such
a box.
"My stepfather then took it back," Enid related, "and said that it held
his fate and fortune; that he would live and prosper until the secret
writing within it should be taken forth and destroyed."
"I remember where that box is," Lanark said breathlessly to Jager. "In
the old oven, at----"
"We could not open it, either," interrupted the preacher.
"He spoke of that, too," Enid told them. "It would never open, he told
Larue, save in the 'place of the Nameless One'--that must be where the
house burned--and at midnight under a full moon."
"A full moon!" exclaimed Lanark.
"There is a full moon tonight," said Jager.
_11. Return of the Sacrifice_
Through the cross-hatching of new-leafed branches the full moon shone
down from its zenith. Lanark and Enid Mandifer walked gingerly through
the night-filled timber in the gulley beyond which, they knew, lay the
ruins of the house where so much repellent mystery had been born.
"It's just eleven o'clock," whispered Lanark, looking at his big silver
watch. He was dressed in white shirt and dark trousers, without coat,
hat or gloves. His revolver rode in the front of his waistband, and as
he limped along, the sheath of Jager's old cavalry saber thumped and
rasped his left boot-top. "We must be almost there."
"We are there," replied Enid. "Here's the clearing, and the little
brook of water."
She was right. They had come to the open space where first they had
met. The moonlight made the ground and its new grass pallid, and struck
frosty-gold lights from the runlet in the very center of the clearing.
Beyond, to the west, lay menacing shadows.
Enid stooped and laid upon the ground the hand-mirror she carried,
"Stand to one side," she said, "and please don't look."
Lanark obeyed, and the girl began to undress.
The young man felt dew at his mustache, and a chill in his heart that
was not from dew. He stared into the trees beyond the clearing, trying
to have faith in Jager's plan. "We must make the devils come forth and
face us," the sergeant-preacher had argued. "Miss Mandifer shall be our
decoy, to draw them out where we can get at them. All is very strange,
but this much we know--the unholy worship did go on; Miss Mandifer
was to be sacrificed as part of it; and, when the sacrifice was not
completed, all these evil things happened. We have the hauntings, the
blue fire of the house, the creature that attacked Mr. Lanark, and a
host of other mysteries to credit to these causes. Let us profit by
what little we have found out, and put an end to the Devil's rule in
this country."
It had all sounded logical, but Lanark, listening, had been hesitant
until Enid herself agreed. Then it was that Jager, strengthening his
self-assumed position of leadership, had made the assignments. Enid
would make the journey, as before, from her house to the gulley, there
strip and say the words with which her stepfather had charged her four
springs ago. Lanark, armed, would accompany her as guard. Jager himself
would circle far to the east and approach the ruins from the opposite
direction, observing, and, if need be, attacking.
These preparations Lanark reviewed mentally, while he heard Enid's bare
feet splashing timidly in the water. It came to him, a bit too late,
that the arms he bore might not avail against supernatural enemies. Yet
Jager had seemed confident.... Enid was speaking, apparently repeating
the ritual that was supposed to summon the unnamed god-demon of Persil
Mandifer:
"A maid, alone and pure, I stand, not upon water nor on land; I hold a
mirror in my hand, in which to see what Fate may send...." She broke
off and screamed.
Lanark whipped around. The girl stood, misty-pale in the wash of
moonlight, all crouched and curved together like a bow.
"It was coming!" she quavered. "I saw it in the mirror--over yonder,
among those trees----"
Lanark glared across the little strip of water and the moonlit grass
beyond. Ten paces away, between two trunks, something shone in the
shadows--shone darkly, like tar, though the filtered moon-rays did
not touch it. He saw nothing of the shape, save that it moved and
lived--and watched.
He drew his revolver and fired, twice. There was a crash of twigs, as
though something had flinched backward at the reports.
Lanark splashed through the water and, despite his limp, charged at the
place where the presence lurked.
_12. Jager_
It had been some minutes before eleven o'clock when Jager reined in his
old black horse at a distance of two miles from Fearful Rock.
Most of those now alive who knew Jager personally are apt to describe
him as he was when they were young and he was old--a burly graybeard, a
notable preacher and exhorter, particularly at funerals. He preferred
the New Testament to the Old, though he was apt to misquote his texts
from either; and he loved children, and once preached a telling sermon
against the proposition of infant damnation. His tombstone, at Fort
Smith, Arkansas, bears as epitaph a verse from the third chapter of the
first book of Samuel: _Here am I, for thou didst call me_.
Jager when young is harder to study and to visualize. However, the
diary of a long-dead farmer's wife of Pennsylvania records that the
"Jager boy" was dull but serious at school, and that his appetite for
mince pie amounted to a passion. In Topeka, Kansas, lives a retired
railroad conductor whose father, on the pre-Rebellion frontier, once
heard Jager defy Southern hoodlums to shoot him for voting Free-state
in a territorial election. Ex-Major Kane Lanark mentioned Jager
frequently and with admiration in the remarkable pen-and-ink memoir on
which the present narrative is based.
How he approached Fearful Rock, and what he encountered there, he
himself often described verbally to such of his friends as pretended
that they believed him.
The moonlight showed him a stunted tree, with one gnarled root looping
up out of the earth, and to that root he tethered his animal. Then,
like Lanark, he threw off his coat, strapping it to the cantle of his
saddle, and unfastened his "hickory" blue shirt at the throat. From
a saddlebag he drew a trusty-looking revolver, its barrel sawed off.
Turning its butt toward the moon, he spun the cylinder to make sure
that it was loaded. Then he thrust it into his belt without benefit of
holster, and started on foot toward the rock and its remains of a house.
Approaching, he sought by instinct the cover of trees and bush-clumps,
moving smoothly and noiselessly; Jager had been noted during his
service in the Army of the Frontier for his ability to scout at night,
an ability which he credited to the fact that he had been born in the
darkest hours. He made almost as good progress as though he had been
moving in broad daylight. At eleven o'clock sharp, as he guessed--like
many men who never carry watches, he had become good at judging the
time--he was within two hundred yards of the rock itself, and cover had
run out. There he paused, chin-deep in a clump of early weeds.
Lanark and the girl, as he surmised, must be well into the gulley by
this time. He, Jager, smiled as he remembered with what alacrity Lanark
had accepted the assignment of bodyguard to Enid Mandifer. Those two
young people acted as if they were on the brink of falling in love, and
no mistake....
His eyes were making out details of the scene ahead. Was even the full
moon so bright as all this? He could not see very clearly the ruined
foundations, for they sat in a depression of the earth. Yet there
seemed to be a clinging blue light at about that point, a feeble but
undeniable blue. Mentally he compared it to deep, still water, then to
the poorest of skimmed milk. Jager remembered the flames that once had
burned there, blue as amethyst.
But the blue light was not solid, and it had no heat. Within it, dimmed
as though by mist, stood and moved--figures. They were human, at least
they were upright; and they stood in a row, like soldiers, all but two.
That pair was dark-seeming, and one was grossly thick, the other thin
as an exclamation point. The line moved, bent, formed a weaving circle
which spread as its units opened their order. Jager had never seen such
a maneuver in four years of army service.
Now the circle was moving, rolling around; the figures were tramping
counter-clockwise--"withershins" was the old-fashioned word for that
kind of motion, as Jager remembered from his boyhood in Pennsylvania.
The two darker figures, the ones that had stood separate, were nowhere
to be seen; perhaps they were inclosed in the center of the turning
circle, the moving shapes of which numbered six. There had been six of
Quantrill's guerrillas that died in almost that spot.
The ground was bare except for spring grass, but Jager made shift
to crawl forward on hands and knees, his eyes fixed on the group
ahead, his beard bristling nervously upon his set chin. He crept ten
yards, twenty yards, forty. Some high stalks of grass, killed but not
leveled by winter, afforded him a bit of cover, and he paused again,
taking care not to rustle the dry stems. He could see the maneuvering
creatures more plainly.
They were men, all right, standing each upon two legs, waving each
two arms. No, one of them had only an arm and a stump. Had not one of
Quantrill's men--yes! It came to the back of Jager's mind that Lanark
himself had cut away an enemy's pistol hand with a stroke of his saber.
Again he reflected that there had been six dead guerrillas, and that
six were the forms treading so strange a measure yonder. He began to
crawl forward again. Sweat made a slow, cold trickle along his spine.
But the two that had stood separate from the six were not to be seen
anywhere, inside the circle or out. And Jager began to fancy that his
first far glimpse had shown him something strange about that pair of
dark forms, something inhuman or sub-human.
Then a shot rang out, clear and sharp. It came from beyond the circle
of creatures and the blue-misted ruins. A second shot followed it.
* * * * *
Jager almost rose into plain view in the moonlight, but fell flat a
moment later. Indeed, he might well have been seen by those he spied
upon, had they not all turned in the direction whence the shots had
sounded. Jager heard voices, a murmur of them with nothing that sounded
like articulate words. He made bold to rise on his hands for a closer
look. The six figures were moving eastward, as though to investigate.
Jager lifted himself to hands and knees, then rose to a crouch. He ran
forward, drawing his gun as he did so. The great uneven shaft that was
Fearful Rock gave him a bar of shadow into which he plunged gratefully,
and a moment later he was at the edge of the ruin-filled foundation
hole, perhaps at the same point where Lanark had stood the night
before.
From that pit rose the diluted blue radiance that seemed to involve
this quarter. Staring thus closely, Jager found the light similar to
that given off by rotten wood, or fungi, or certain brands of lucifer
matches. It was like an echo of light, he pondered rather absently,
and almost grinned at his own malapropism. But he was not here to make
jokes with himself.
He listened, peered about, then began moving cautiously along the lip
of the foundation hole. Another shot he heard, and a loud, defiant yell
that sounded like Lanark; then an answering burst of laughter, throaty
and muffled, that seemed to come from several mouths at once. Jager
felt a new and fiercer chill. He, an earnest Protestant from birth,
signed himself with the cross--signed himself with the right hand that
clutched his revolver.
Yet there was no doubt as to which way lay his duty. He skirted the
open foundation of the ruined house, moved eastward over the trampled
earth where the six things had formed their open-order circle. Like
Lanark, he saw the opened grave-trench. He paused and gazed down.
Two sack-like blotches of pallor lay there--Lanark had described them
correctly: they were empty human skins. Jager paused. There was no
sound from ahead; he peered and saw the ravine to eastward, filled with
trees and gloom. He hesitated at plunging in, the place was so ideal an
ambush. Even as he paused, his toes at the brink of the opened grave,
he heard a smashing, rustling noise. Bodies were returning through the
twigs and leafage of the ravine, returning swiftly.
Had they met Lanark and vanquished him? Had they spied or sensed Jager
in their rear?
He was beside the grave, and since the first year of the war he had
known what to do, with enemy approaching and a deep hole at hand. He
dived in, head first like a chipmunk into its burrow, and landed on the
bottom on all fours.
His first act was to shake his revolver, lest sand had stopped the
muzzle.
A charm from the _Long Lost Friend_ book whispered itself through his
brain, a marksman's charm to bring accuracy with the gun. He repeated
it, half audibly, without knowing what the words might mean:
"_Ut nemo in sense tentant, descendre nemo; at precedenti spectatur
mantica tergo._"
At that instant his eyes fell upon the nearest of the two pallid, empty
skins, which lay full in the moonlight. He forgot everything else.
For he knew that collapsed face, even without the sharp stiletto-like
bone of the nose to jut forth in its center. He knew that narrowness
through the jowls and temples, that height of brow, that hair white as
thistledown.
Persil Mandifer's skull had been inside. It must have been there, and
living, recently. Jager's left hand crept out, and drew quickly back
as though it had touched a snake. The texture of the skin was soft,
clammy, moist ... _fresh_!
And the other pallidity like a great empty bladder--that could have
fitted no other body than the gross one of Larue Mandifer.
Thus, Jager realized, had Lanark entered the grave on the night before,
and found these same two skins. Looking up, Lanark had found a horrid
enemy waiting to grapple him.
Jager, too, looked up.
A towering silhouette shut out half the starry sky overhead.
_13. Lanark_
The combination of pluck and common sense is something of a rarity,
and men who possess that combination are apt to go far. Kane Lanark
was such a man, and though he charged unhesitatingly across the little
strip of water and at the unknown thing in the trees, he was not
outrunning his discretion.
He had seen men die in his time, many of them in abject flight, with
bullets overtaking them in the spine or the back of the head. It was
nothing pleasant to watch, but it crystallized within his mind the
realization that dread of death is no armor against danger, and that
an enemy attacked is far less formidable than an enemy attacking. That
brace of maxims comforted him and bore him up in more tight places than
one.
And General Blunt of the Army of the Frontier, an officer who was all
that his name implies and who was never given to overstatement, once so
unbent as to say in official writing that Captain Kane Lanark was an
ornament to any combat force.
And so his rush was nothing frantic. All that faltered was his lame
leg. He meant to destroy the thing that had showed itself, but fully as
definitely he meant not to be destroyed by it. As he ran, he flung his
revolver across to his left hand and dragged free the saber that danced
at his side.
But the creature he wanted to meet did not bide his coming. He heard
another crash and rattle--it had backed into some shrubs or bushes
farther in among the trees. He paused under the branches of the first
belt of timber, well aware that he was probably a fair mark for a
bullet. Yet he did not expect a gun in the hands of whatever lurked
ahead; he was not sure at all that it even had hands.
Of a sudden he felt, rather than saw, motion upon his left flank.
He pivoted upon the heel of his sound right foot and, lifting the
saber, spat professionally between hilt and palm. He meant killing,
did Lanark, but nothing presented itself. A chuckle drifted to him, a
contemptuous burble of sound; he thought of what Enid had said about
divining her stepfather's mockery. Again the chuckle, dying away toward
the left.
But up ahead came more noise of motion, and this was identifiable as
feet--heavy, measured tramping of feet. New and stupid recruits walked
like that, in their first drills. So did tired soldiers on the march.
And the feet were coming his way.
Lanark's first reaction to this realization was of relief. Marching
men, even enemies, would be welcome because he knew how to deal with
them. Then he thought of Enid behind him, probably in retreat out of
the gully. He must give her time to get away. He moved westward, toward
the approaching party, but with caution and silence.
The moonlight came patchily down through the lattice-like mass of
branches and twigs, and again Lanark saw motion. This time it was
directly ahead. He counted five, then six figures, quite human. The
moonlight, when they moved in it, gave him glimpses of butternut
shirts, white faces. One had a great waterfall of beard.
Lanark drew a deep breath. "Stand!" he shouted, and with his left hand
leveled his pistol.
They stood, but only for a moment. Each figure's attitude shifted ever
so slightly as Lanark moved a pace forward. The trees were sparse
around him, and the moon shone stronger through their branches. He
recognized the man with the great beard--he did not need to see that
one arm was hewed away halfway between wrist and elbow. Another face
was equally familiar, with its sharp mustaches and wide eyes; he had
stared into it no longer ago than last night.
The six guerrillas stirred into motion again, approaching and closing
in. Lanark had them before him in a semi-circle.
"Stand!" he said again, and when they did not he fired, full for the
center of that black beard in the forefront. The body of the guerrilla
started and staggered--no more. It had been hit, but it was not going
to fall. Lanark knew a sudden damp closeness about him, as though he
stood in a small room full of sweaty garments. The six figures were
converging, like beasts seeking a common trough or manger.
He did not shoot again. The man he had shot was not bleeding. Six pairs
of eyes fixed themselves upon him, with a steadiness that was more than
unwinking. He wondered, inconsequentially, if those eyes had lids....
Now they were within reach.
He fell quickly on guard with his saber, whirling it to left and then
to right, the old moulinets he had learned in the fencing-room at the
Virginia Military Institute. Again the half-dozen approachers came to
an abrupt stop, one or two flinching back from the twinkling tongue of
steel. Lanark extended his arm, made a wider horizontal sweep with his
point, and the space before him widened. The two forms at the horns of
the semi-circle began to slip forward and outward, as though to pass
him and take him in the rear.
"That won't do," Lanark said aloud, and hopped quickly forward, then
lunged at the blackbeard. His point met flesh, or at least a soft
substance. No bones impeded it. A moment later his basket-hilt thudded
against the butternut shirt front, the figure reeled backward from the
force of the blow. With a practised wrench, Lanark cleared his weapon,
cutting fiercely at another who was moving upon him with an unnerving
lightness. His edge came home, and he drew it vigorously toward
himself--a bread-slicing maneuver that would surely lay flesh open to
the bone, disable one assailant. But the creature only tottered and
came in again, and Lanark saw that the face he had hacked almost in two
was the one with bulge eyes and spike mustaches.
All he could do was side-step and then retreat--retreat eastward in the
direction of Fearful Rock. The black-bearded thing was down, stumbled
or swooning, and he sprang across it. As he did so the body writhed
just beneath him, clutching with one hand upward. Hooked by an ankle,
Lanark fell sprawling at full length, losing his revolver but not his
sword. He twisted over at his left side, hacking murderously in the
direction of his feet. As once before, he cut away a hand and wrist
and was free. He surged to his feet, and found the blackbeard also up,
thrusting its hairy, fishy-white face at him. With dark rage swelling
his every muscle, Lanark carried his right arm back across his chest,
his right hand with the hilt going over his left shoulder. Then he
struck at the hairy head with all the power of arm and shoulder and,
turning his body, thrust in its weight behind the blow. The head flew
from the shoulders, as though it had been stuck there ever so lightly.
Then the others were pushing around and upon him. Lanark smelled blood,
rot, dampness, filth. He heard, for the first time, soft snickering
voices, that spoke no words but seemed to be sneering at him for
the entertainment of one another. The work was too close to thrust;
he hacked and hewed, and struck with the curved guard as with brass
knuckles. And they fell back from him, all but one form that could not
see.
It tottered heavily and gropingly toward him, hunching its headless
shoulders and holding out its handless arms, as though it played with
him a game of blind-man's-buff. And from that horrid truncated enemy
Lanark fled, fled like a deer for all his lameness.
* * * * *
They followed, but they made slow, stupid work of it. Lanark's sword,
which could not kill, had wounded them all. He was well ahead, coming
to rising ground, toiling upward out of the gully, into the open
country shadowed by Fearful Rock.
He paused there, clear of the trees, wiped his clammy brow with the
sleeve of his left arm. The moon was so bright overhead that it almost
blinded him. He became aware of a kneading, clasping sensation at his
right ankle, and looked down to see what caused it.
A hand clung there, a hand without arm or body. It was a pale hand that
moved and crawled, as if trying to mount his boot-leg and get at his
belly--his heart--his throat. The bright moon showed him the strained
tendons of it, and the scant coarse hair upon its wide back.
Lanark opened his lips to scream like any woman, but no sound came.
With his other foot he scraped the thing loose and away. Its fingers
quitted their hold grudgingly, and under the sole of his boot they
curled and writhed upward, like the legs of an overturned crab. They
fastened upon his instep.
When, with the point of his saber, he forced the thing free again,
still he saw that it lived and groped for a hold upon him. With his
lip clenched bloodily between his teeth, he chopped and minced at the
horrid little thing, and even then its severed fingers humped and
inched upon the ground, like worms.
"It won't die," Lanark murmured hoarsely, aloud; often in the past he
had thought that speaking thus, when one was alone, presaged insanity.
"It won't die--not though I chop it into atoms until the evil is driven
away."
Then he wondered, for the first time since he had left Enid, where
Jager was. He turned in the direction of the rock and the ruined house,
and walked wearily for perhaps twenty paces. He was swimming in sweat,
and blood throbbed in his ears.
Then he found himself looking into the open grave where the guerrillas
had lain, whence they had issued to fight once more. At the bottom he
saw the two palenesses that were empty skins.
He saw something else--a dark form that was trying to scramble out.
Once again he tightened his grip upon the hilt of his saber.
At the same instant he knew that still another creature was hurrying
out of the gulley and at him from behind.
_14. Enid_
Lanark's guess was wrong; Enid Mandifer had not retreated westward up
the gulley.
She had stared, all in a heart-stopping chill, as Lanark made for the
thing that terrified her. As though of themselves, her hands reached
down to the earth, found her dress, and pulled it over her head. She
thrust her feet into her shoes. Then she moved, at only a fast walk,
after Lanark.
There was really nothing else she could have done, and Lanark might
have known that, had he been able to take thought in the moments that
followed. Had she fled, she would have had no place to go save to the
house where once her stepfather had lived; and it would be no refuge,
but a place of whispering horror. Too, she would be alone, dreadfully
alone. It took no meditation on her part to settle the fact that Lanark
was her one hope of protection. As a matter of simple fact, he would
have done well to remain with her, on the defensive; but then, he could
not have foreseen what was waiting in the shadowed woods beyond.
She did carry something that might serve as a weapon--the hand-mirror.
And in a pocket of her dress lay the Bible, of which she had once told
Lanark. She had read much in it, driven by terror, and I daresay it was
as much a talisman to her as was the _Long Lost Friend_ to Jager.
Her lips pattered a verse from it: "Deliver me from mine enemies, O my
God ... for lo, they lie in wait for my soul."
It was hard for her to decide what she had expected to find within
the rim of trees beyond the clearing. Lanark was not in sight, but a
commotion had risen some little distance ahead. Enid moved onward,
because she must.
She heard Lanark's pistol shot, and then what sounded like several
men struggling. She tried to peer and see, but there was only a swirl
of violent motion, and through it the flash of steel--that would be
Lanark's saber. She crouched behind a wide trunk.
"That is useless," said an accented voice she knew, close at her elbow.
She spun around, stared and sprang away. It was not her stepfather
that stood there. The form was human to some degree--it had arms and
legs, and a featureless head; but its nakedness was slimy wet and dark,
and about it clung a smell of blood.
"That is useless," muttered once more the voice of Persil Mandifer.
"You do not hide from the power that rules this place."
Behind the first dark slimness came a second shape, a gross immensity,
equally black and foul and shiny. Larue?
"You have offered yourself," said Persil Mandifer, though Enid could
see no lips move in the filthy-seeming shadow that should have been a
face. "I think you will be accepted this time. Of course, it cannot
profit me--what I am now, I shall be always. Perhaps you, too----"
Larue's voice chuckled, and Enid ran, toward where Lanark had been
fighting. That would be more endurable than this mad dream forced upon
her. Anything would be more endurable. Twigs and thorns plucked at her
skirt like spiteful fingers, but she ripped away from them and ran. She
came into another clearing, a small one. The moon, striking between the
boughs, made here a pool of light and touched up something of metal.
It was Lanark's revolver. Enid bent and seized it. A few feet away
rested something else, something rather like a strangely shaggy
cabbage. As Enid touched the gun, she saw what that fringed rondure
was. A head, but living, as though its owner had been buried to his
bearded chin.
[Illustration: "It was a head, but living, as though its owner had been
buried to his bearded chin."]
"What----" she began to ask aloud. It was surely living, its eyebrows
arched and scowled and its gleaming eyes moved. Its tongue crawled out
and licked grinning, hairy lips. She saw its smile, hard and brief as a
knife flashed for a moment from its scabbard.
Enid Mandifer almost dropped the revolver. She had become sickeningly
aware that the head possessed no body.
"There is the rest of him," spoke Persil Mandifer, again behind her
shoulder. And she saw a heart-shaking terror, staggering and groping
between the trees, a body without a head or hands.
She ran again, but slowly and painfully, as though this were in truth
a nightmare. The headless hulk seemed to divine her effort at retreat,
for it dragged itself clumsily across, as though to cut her off. It
held out its handless stumps of arms.
"No use to shoot," came Persil Mandifer's mocking comment--he was
following swiftly. "That poor creature cannot be killed again."
* * * * *
Other shapes were approaching from all sides, shapes dressed in filthy,
ragged clothes. The face of one was divided by a dark cleft, as though
Lanark's saber had split it, but no blood showed. Another seemed to
have no lower jaw; the remaining top of his face jutted forward, like
the short visage of a snake lifted to strike. These things had eyes,
turned unblinkingly upon her; they could see and approach.
The headless torso blundered at her again, went past by inches. It
recovered itself and turned. It knew, somehow, that she was there;
it was trying to capture her. She shrank away, staring around for an
avenue of escape.
"Be thankful," droned Persil Mandifer from somewhere. "These are no
more than dead men, whipped into a mockery of life. They will prepare
you a little for the wonders to come."
But Enid had commanded her shuddering muscles. She ran. One of the
things caught her sleeve, but the cloth tore and she won free. She
heard sounds that could hardly be called voices, from the mouths of
such as had mouths. And Persil Mandifer laughed quietly, and said
something in a language Enid had never heard before. The thick voice
of his son Larue answered him in the same tongue, then called out in
English:
"Enid, you only run in the direction we want you to run!"
It was true, and there was nothing that she could do about it. The
entities behind her were following, not very fast, like herdsmen
leisurely driving a sheep in the way it should go. And she knew that
the sides of the gulley, to north and south, could never be climbed.
There was only the slope ahead to the eastward, up which Lanark must
have gone. The thought of him strengthened her. If the two of them
found the king-horror, the Nameless One, at the base of Fearful Rock,
they could face it together.
She was aware that she had come out of the timber of the ravine.
All was moonlight here, painted by the soft pallor in grays and silvers
and shadow-blacks. There was the rock lifted among the stars, there the
stretch of clump-dotted plain--and here, almost before her, Lanark.
He stood poised above a hole in the ground, his saber lifted above his
head as though to begin a downward sweep. Something burly was climbing
up out of that hole. But, even as he tightened his sinews to strike,
Lanark whirled around, and his eyes glared murderously at Enid.
_15. Evil's End_
"Don't!" Enid screamed. "Don't, it's only I----"
Lanark growled, and spun back to face what was now hoisting itself
above ground level.
"And be careful of me, too," said the object. "It's Jager, Mr. Lanark."
The point of the saber lowered. The three of them were standing close
together on the edge of the opened grave. Lanark looked down. He saw at
the bottom the two areas of loose white.
"Are those the----"
"Yes," Jager replied without waiting for him to finish. "Two human
skins. They are fresh; soft and damp." Enid was listening, but she was
past shuddering. "One of them," continued Jager, "was taken from Persil
Mandifer. I know his face."
He made a scuffing kick-motion with one boot. Clods flew into the
grave, falling with a dull plop, as upon wet blankets. He kicked more
earth down, swiftly and savagely.
"Help me," he said to the others. "Salt should be thrown on those
skins--that's what the old legends say--but we have no salt. Dirt will
have to do. Don't you see?" he almost shrieked. "Somewhere near here,
two bodies are hiding, or moving about, without these skins to cover
them."
Both Lanark and Enid knew they had seen those bodies. In a moment three
pairs of feet were thrusting earth down into the grave.
"Don't!" It was a wail from the trees in the ravine, a wail in the
voice of Persil Mandifer. "We must return to those skins before dawn!"
Two black silhouettes, wetly shiny in the moonlight, had come into the
open. Behind them straggled six more, the guerrillas.
"Don't!" came the cry again, this time a command. "You cannot destroy
us now. It is midnight, the hour of the Nameless One."
At the word "midnight" an idea fairly exploded itself in Lanark's
brain. He thrust his sword into the hands of his old sergeant.
"Guard against them," he said in the old tone of command. "That book of
yours may serve as shield, and Enid's Bible. I have something else to
do."
He turned and ran around the edge of the grave, then toward the hole
that was filled with the ruins of the old house; the hole that emitted
a glow of weak blue light.
Into it he flung himself, wondering if this diluted gleam of the old
unearthly blaze would burn him. It did not; his booted legs felt warmth
like that of a hot stove, no more. From above he heard the voice of
Jager, shouting, tensely and masterfully, a formula from the _Long Lost
Friend_:
"Ye evil things, stand and look upon me for a moment, while I charm
three drops of blood from you, which you have forfeited. The first from
your teeth, the second from your lungs, the third from your heart's own
main." Louder went his voice, and higher, as though he had to fight to
keep down his hysteria: "God bid me vanquish you all!"
Lanark had reached the upward column of the broken chimney. All about
his feet lay fragments, glowing blue. He shoved at them with his toe.
There was an oblong of metal. He touched it--yes, that had been a door
to an old brick oven. He lifted it. Underneath lay what he had hidden
four years ago--a case of unknown construction.
But as he picked it up, he saw that it had a lid. What had Enid
overheard from her stepfather, so long ago? "... that he would live
and prosper until the secret writing should be taken forth and
destroyed ... it would never open, save at the place of the Nameless
One, at midnight under a full moon."
With his thumbnail he pried at the lid, and it came open easily.
The box seemed full of darkness, and when he thrust in his hands he
felt something crumble, like paper burned to ashes. That was what it
was--ashes. He turned the case over, and let the flakes fall out, like
strange black snow.
From somewhere resounded a shriek, or chorus of shrieks. Then a
woman weeping--that would be Enid--and a cry of "God be thanked!"
unmistakably from Jager. The blue light died away all around Lanark,
and his legs were cool. The old basement had fallen strangely dark.
Then he was aware of great fatigue, the trembling of his hands, the
ropy weakness of his lamed leg. And he could not climb out again, until
Jager came and put down a hand.
* * * * *
At rosy dawn the three sat on the front stoop of Jager's cabin. Enid
was pouring coffee from a serviceable old black pot.
"We shall never know all that happened and portended," said Jager,
taking a mouthful of home-made bread, "but what we have seen will tell
us all that we should know."
"This much is plain," added Lanark. "Persil Mandifer worshipped an evil
spirit, and that evil spirit had life and power."
"Perhaps we would know everything, if the paper in the box had not
burned in the fire," went on Jager. "That is probably as well--that
it burned, I mean. Some secrets are just as well never told." He fell
thoughtful, pulled his beard, and went on. "Even burned, the power of
that document worked; but when the ashes fell from their case, all was
over. The bodies of the guerrillas were dry bones on the instant, and
as for the skinless things that moved and spoke as Mandifer and his
son----"
He broke off, for Enid had turned deathly pale at memory of that part
of the business.
"We shall go back when the sun is well up," said Lanark, "and put those
things back to rest in their grave."
He sat for a moment, coffee-cup in hand, and gazed into the brightening
sky.
To the two items he had spoken of as plainly indicated, he mentally
added a third; the worship carried on by Persil Mandifer--was that name
French, perhaps Main-de-Fer?--was tremendously old. He, Persil, must
have received teachings in it from a former votary, his father perhaps,
and must have conducted a complex and secret ritual for decades.
The attempted sacrifice rite for which Enid had been destined was
something the world would never know, not as regards the climax. For
a little band of Yankee horsemen, with himself at their head, had
blundered into the situation, throwing it completely out of order and
spelling for it the beginning of the end.
The end had come. Lanark was sure of that. How much of the power and
motivity of the worship had been exerted by the Nameless One that now
must continue nameless, how much of it was Persil Mandifer's doing,
how much was accident of nature and horror-hallucination of witnesses,
nobody could now decide. As Jager had suggested, it was probably as
well that part of the mystery would remain. Things being as they were,
one might pick up the threads of his normal human existence, and be
happy and fearless.
But he could not forget what he had seen. The two Mandifers, able to
live or to counterfeit life by creeping from their skins at night, had
perished as inexplicably as they had been resurrected. The guerrillas,
too, whose corpses had challenged him, must be finding a grateful rest
now that the awful semblance of life had quitted their slack, butchered
limbs. And the blue fire that had burst forth in the midst of the old
battle, to linger ghostwise for years; the horned image that Jager had
broken; the seeming powers of the _Long Lost Friend_, as an amulet and
a storehouse of charms--these were items in the strange fabric. He
would remember them for ever, without rationalizing them.
He drank coffee, into which someone, probably Enid, had dropped sugar
while he mused. Rationalization, he decided, was not enough, had never
been enough. To judge a large and dark mystery by what vestigial
portions touched one, was to err like the blind men in the old doggerel
who, groping at an elephant here and there, called it in turn a snake,
a spear, a tree, a fan, a wall. Better not to brood or ponder upon what
had happened. Try to be thankful, and forget.
"I shall build my church under Fearful Rock," Jager was saying, "and it
shall be called Fearful Rock no more, but Welcome Rock."
Lanark looked up. Enid had come and seated herself beside him. He
studied her profile. Suddenly he could read her thoughts, as plainly as
though they were written upon her cheek.
She was thinking that grass would grow anew in her front yard, and that
she would marry Kane Lanark as soon as he asked her.
THE END
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