“The dead should defend themselves,” laughed l'Armon. “Somehow, I will slay the man who kills me, though my corpse climb up forty fathoms of ocean to do it.”
Kane turned toward the outer door, closing the door of the secret room behind him. He liked not this talk which smacked of demonry and witchcraft; and he was in haste to face the host with the charge of his guilt.
As he turned, with his back to the Frenchman, he felt the touch of cold steel against his neck and knew that a pistol muzzle was pressed close beneath the base of his brain.
“Move not, m'sieu!” The voice was low and silky. “Move not, or I will scatter your few brains over the room.”
The Puritan, raging inwardly, stood with his hands in the air while l'Armon slipped his pistols and sword from their sheaths.
“Now you can turn,” said Gaston, stepping back.
Kane bent a grim eye on the dapper fellow, who stood bareheaded now, hat in one hand, the other hand leveling his long pistol.
“Gaston the Butcher!” said the Englishman somberly. “Fool that I was to trust a Frenchman! You range far, murderer! I remember you now, with that cursed great hat off – I saw you in Calais some years agone.”
“Aye – and now you will see me never again. What was that?”
“Rats exploring yon skeleton,” said Kane, watching the bandit like a hawk, waiting for a single slight wavering of that black gun muzzle. “The sound was of the rattle of bones.”
“Like enough,” returned the other. “Now, M'sieu Kane, I know you carry considerable money on your person. I had thought to wait until you slept and then slay you, but the opportunity presented itself and I took it. You trick easily.”
“I had little thought that I should fear a man with whom I had broken bread,” said Kane, a deep timbre of slow fury sounding in his voice.
The bandit laughed cynically. His eyes narrowed as he began to back slowly toward the outer door. Kane's sinews tensed involuntarily; he gathered himself like a giant wolf about to launch himself in a death leap, but Gaston's hand was like a rock and the pistol never trembled.
“We will have no death plunges after the shot,” said Gaston. “Stand still, m'sieu; I have seen men killed by dying men, and I wish to have distance enough between us to preclude that possibility. My faith – I will shoot, you will roar and charge, but you will die before you reach me with your bare hands. And mine host will have another skeleton in his secret niche. That is, if I do not kill him myself. The fool knows me not nor I him, moreover –”
The Frenchman was in the doorway now, sighting along the barrel. The candle, which had been stuck in a niche on the wall, shed a weird and flickering light which did not extend past the doorway. And with the suddenness of death, from the darkness behind Gaston's back, a broad, vague form rose up and a gleaming blade swept down. The Frenchman went to his knees like a butchered ox, his brains spilling from his cleft skull. Above him towered the figure of the host, a wild and terrible spectacle, still holding the hanger with which he had slain the bandit.
“Ho! ho!” he roared. “Back!”
Kane had leaped forward as Gaston fell, but the host thrust into his very face a long pistol which he held in his left hand.
“Back!” he repeated in a tigerish roar, and Kane retreated from the menacing weapon and the insanity in the red eyes.
The Englishman stood silent, his flesh crawling as he sensed a deeper and more hideous threat than the Frenchman had offered. There was something inhuman about this man, who now swayed to and fro like some great forest beast while his mirthless laughter boomed out again.
“Gaston the Butcher!” he shouted, kicking the corpse at his feet. “Ho! ho! My fine brigand will hunt no more! I had heard of this fool who roamed the Black Forest – he wished gold and he found death! Now your gold shall be mine; and more than gold – vengeance!”
“I am no foe of yours,” Kane spoke calmly.
“All men are my foes! Look – the marks on my wrists! See – the marks on my ankles! And deep in my back – the kiss of the knout! And deep in my brain, the wounds of the years of the cold, silent cells where I lay as punishment for a crime I never committed!” The voice broke in a hideous, grotesque sob.
Kane made no answer. This man was not the first he had seen whose brain had shattered amid the horrors of the terrible Continental prisons.
“But I escaped!” the scream rose triumphantly, “and here I make war on all men. . . . What was that?”
Did Kane see a flash of fear in those hideous eyes?
“My sorcerer is rattling his bones!” whispered the host, then laughed wildly. “Dying, he swore his very bones would weave a net of death for me. I shackled his corpse to the floor, and now, deep in the night, I hear his bare skeleton clash and rattle as he seeks to be free, and I laugh, I laugh! Ho! ho! How he yearns to rise and stalk like old King Death along these dark corridors when I sleep, to slay me in my bed!”
Suddenly the insane eyes flared hideously: “You were in that secret room, you and this dead fool! Did he talk to you?”
Kane shuddered in spite of himself. Was it insanity or did he actually hear the faint rattle of bones, as if the skeleton had moved slightly? Kane shrugged his shoulders; rats will even tug at dusty bones.
The host was laughing again. He sidled around Kane, keeping the Englishman always covered, and with his free hand opened the door. All was darkness within, so that Kane could not even see the glimmer of the bones on the floor.
“All men are my foes!” mumbled the host, in the incoherent manner of the insane. “Why should I spare any man? Who lifted a hand to my aid when I lay for years in the vile dungeons of Karlsruhe – and for a deed never proven? Something happened to my brain, then. I became as a wolf – a brother to these of the Black Forest to which I fled when I escaped.
“They have feasted, my brothers, on all who lay in my tavern – all except this one who now clashes his bones, this magician from Russia. Lest he come stalking back through the black shadows when night is over the world, and slay me – for who may slay the dead? – I stripped his bones and shackled him. His sorcery was not powerful enough to save him from me, but all men know that a dead magician is more evil than a living one. Move not, Englishman! Your bones I shall leave in this secret room beside this one, to –”
The maniac was standing partly in the doorway of the secret room, now, his weapon still menacing Kane. Suddenly he seemed to topple backward, and vanished in the darkness; and at the same instant a vagrant gust of wind swept down the outer corridor and slammed the door shut behind him. The candle on the wall flickered and went out. Kane's groping hands, sweeping over the floor, found a pistol, and he straightened, facing the door where the maniac had vanished. He stood in the utter darkness, his blood freezing, while a hideous muffled screaming came from the secret room, intermingled with the dry, grisly rattle of fleshless bones. Then silence fell.
Kane found flint and steel and lighted the candle. Then, holding it in one hand and the pistol in the other, he opened the secret door.
“Great God!” he muttered as cold sweat formed on his body. “This thing is beyond all reason, yet with mine own eyes I see it! Two vows have here been kept, for Gaston the Butcher swore that even in death he would avenge his slaying, and his was the hand which set yon fleshless monster free. And he –”
The host of the Cleft Skull lay lifeless on the floor of the secret room, his bestial face set in lines of terrible fear; and deep in his broken neck were sunk the bare fingerbones of the sorcerer's skeleton.
The Castle of the Devil
(Fragment)
The Castle of the Devil
A rider was singing down the forest trail in the growing twilight, keeping time to his horse's easy jog. He was a tall rangy man, broad of shoulder and deep of chest with keen restless eyes which seemed at once to challenge and mock.
“Hola!” he drew his horse to a sudden stop and looked down curiously at the man who rose from his seat on a stone beside th
e road. This man was even taller than the rider – a lean somber man clad in plain dark garments, his features a dark pallor.
“An Englishman? And a Puritan by the cut o' that garb,” commented the man on the horse. “I am glad to see a countryman in this outlandish domain, even such a melancholy fellow as you seem. My name is John Silent and I am bound for Genoa.”
“I am Solomon Kane,” the other answered in a deep measured voice. “I am a wanderer on the face of the earth and have no destination.”
John Silent frowned down at the Puritan in puzzlement. The deep cold eyes gazed back at him unswerving.
“Name of the Devil, man, know you not whither you are bound at the present?”
“Wherever the spirit moves me to go,” answered Solomon. “Just now I find myself in this wild and desolate country through which I journey, doubtless hither drawn for some purpose yet unknown to me.”
Silent sighed and shook his head.
“Mount behind me, man, and we will at least seek some tavern in which to spend the night.”
“I would not overtax your steed, good sir, but if you will permit I will walk along by your side and converse with you, for it is many a month since I have heard good English speech.”
As they went slowly down the trail, John Silent still gazed down at the man, noting the stride that was long and cat-like in spite of Kane's lank build, and the long rapier which hung at his hip. Silent's hand instinctively touched the long curved hanger in his own belt.
“Do you mean to tell me that you journey through the countries of the world with no goal in view, caring not where you may be?”
“Sir, what matters it where a man be if he is carrying out God's plan for him?”
“By Jove,” swore John Silent, “you are even more wayward than I, for though I rove the world also, I always have some goal in mind. As now I come from the command of a troop of soldiery and am going to Genoa to go on board a ship which sails against the Turkish corsairs. Come with me, friend, and learn to sail the seas.”
“I have sailed them and found them to be little to my liking. Many who call themselves honest merchantmen be naught but bloody pirates.”
John Silent hid his grin and changed the subject.
“Then since the spirit has moved you to traverse this land, 'tis like you have found something to your liking herein.”
“No, good sir, I find little here but starving peasants, cruel lords and lawless men. Yet 'tis like that I have done somewhat of good, for only a few hours agone I came upon a wretch who hung on a gallows and cut him down ere his breath had passed from him.”
John Silent nearly fell out of his saddle.
“What! You cut down a man from Baron Von Staler's gibbet? Name of the Devil, you will have both our necks in a noose!”
“You should not curse so hotly,” Solomon reproved mildly. “I know not this Baron Von Staler, but methinks he had hanged a man unjustly. The victim was only a boy and he had a good face.”
“And forsooth,” said John Silent angrily, “you must risk our lives by saving his worthless one, which was already doomed.”
“What else was there to do?” asked Kane with a touch of impatience. “I beg you, vex me no more on the subject but tell me whose castle it is that I see rising above the trees.”
“One which you may come to know much more thoroughly if we make not haste,” Silent answered grimly. “That is the keep of Baron Von Staler, whose gibbet you robbed, and who is the most powerful lord in the Black Forest. There goes the path which leads up the steep to his door; here is the road which we take – the one that leads us quickest and furtherest out of the good Baron's reach.”
“Methinks that is the castle which the peasants have spoken to me of,” mused Kane. “They call it an unsavory name – the Castle of the Devil. Come, let us look into the matter.”
“You mean go up to the castle?” cried Silent, staring.
“Aye, sir. The Baron will scarce refuse two wayfarers a lodging. More, we can ascertain what sort of a man he is. I would like to see this lord who hangs children.”
“And if you like him not?” asked Silent sarcastically.
Kane sighed. “It has fallen upon me, now and again in my sojourns through the world, to ease various evil men of their lives. I have a feeling that it will prove thus with the Baron.”
“Name of two devils!” swore Silent in amazement. “You speak as if you were a judge on a bench and Baron Von Staler bound helpless before you, instead of being as it is – you but one blade and the Baron surrounded by lusty men-at-arms.”
“The right is on my side,” said Kane somberly. “And right is mightier than a thousand men-at-arms. But why all this talk? I have not yet seen the Baron, and who am I to pass judgment unseen. Mayhap the Baron is a righteous man.”
Silent shook his head in wonder.
“You are either an inspired maniac, a fool, or the most courageous man in the world!” he laughed suddenly. “Lead on! 'Tis a wild venture that's like to end in death, but its insanity appeals to me and no man can say that John Silent fails to follow where another man leads!”
“Your speech is wild and Godless,” said Kane, “but I begin to like you.”
“It has fallen upon me, now and again in my sojourns through the world, to ease various evil men of their lives.”
Death's Black Riders
(Fragment)
Death's Black Riders
The hangman asked of the carrion crow,
but the raven made reply:
“Black ride the men who ride with Death
beneath the midnight sky,
“And black each steed and grey each skull
and strange each deathly eye.
“They have given their breath to grey old Death
and yet they cannot die.”
Solomon Kane reined his steed to a halt. No sound broke the death-like stillness of the dark forest which reared starkly about him; yet he sensed that Something was coming down the shadowy trail. It was a strange and ghastly place. The huge trees shouldered each other like taciturn giants, and their intertwining branches shut out the light; so that the white moonlight turned grey as it filtered through, and the trail which meandered among the trees seemed like a dim road through ghostland.
And down this trail, as Solomon Kane halted and drew his pistol, a horseman came flying. A great black horse, incredibly gigantic in the grey light, and on his back a giant of a rider, crouched close over the bow, a shapeless hat drawn low, a great black cloak flying from his shoulders.
Solomon Kane sought to rein aside to let this wild rider go past, but the trail was so narrow and the trees grew so thickly on either side, that he saw it was impossible unless the horseman stopped and gave him time to find an open space. And this the stranger seemed to have no intention of doing.
They swept on, horse and rider a single formless black object like some fabulous monster; now they were only a few strides from the puzzled Kane, and he caught the glint of two burning eyes shadowed by the hat drawn low and the cape held high about the rider's face. Then as he saw the gleam of a sword, he fired pointblank into that face. Then a blast of icy air engulfed him like the surge of a cold river, horse and man went down together, and the black horse and its rider swept over them.
Kane scrambled up, unhurt but wrathful, and examined his snorting, quivering steed, which had risen and stood with dilated nostrils. The horse, too, was unharmed. Kane could not understand it.
The Moon of Skulls
The Moon of Skulls
“The wise men know what wicked things
Are written on the sky;
They trim sad lamps, they touch sad strings
Hearing the heavy purple wings,
Where the forgotten Seraph kings
Still plot how God shall die.”
CHESTERTON
I
A MAN COMES SEEKING
A great black shadow lay across the land, cleaving the red flame of the sunset. To the man who toiled
up the jungle trail it loomed like a symbol of death and horror, a menace brooding and terrible, like the shadow of a stealthy assassin flung upon some candle-lit wall.
Yet it was only the shadow of the great crag which reared up in front of him, the first outpost of the grim foothills which were his goal. He halted a moment at its foot, staring upward where it rose blackly limned against the dying sun. He could have sworn that he caught the hint of a movement at the top, as he stared, hand shielding his eyes, but the fading glare dazzled him and he could not be sure. Was it a man who darted to cover? A man, or –?
He shrugged his shoulders and fell to examining the rough trail which led up and over the brow of the crag. At first glance it seemed that only a mountain goat could scale it, but closer investigation showed numbers of fingerholds drilled into the solid rock. It would be a task to try his powers to the utmost but he had not come a thousand miles to turn back now.
He dropped the large pouch he wore at his shoulder, and laid down the clumsy musket, retaining only his long rapier, dagger, and one of his pistols. These he strapped behind him, and without a backward glance over the darkening trail he had come, he started the long ascent. He was a tall man, long-armed and iron-muscled, yet again and again he was forced to halt in his upward climb and rest for a moment, clinging like an ant to the precipitous face of the cliff. Night fell swiftly and the crag above him was a shadowy blur in which he was forced to feel with his fingers, blindly, for the holes which served him as precarious ladder. Below him, the night noises of the tropical jungle broke forth, yet it appeared to him that even these sounds were subdued and hushed as though the great black hills looming above threw a spell of silence and fear even over the jungle creatures.