Priestess of Murder (5 page)

"The invader hurtled along the corridor, dived into a room at the very
end. I went after him, yelling for Stan."

"I was out, dad, and didn't hear you."

"So I know now. That room door was jammed, and by the time I opened it the
chamber was empty. But the window was open and through it I saw the kidnaper
vanishing into the wood, Leila still on his shoulder. I saw that he must have
climbed down a rainspout that passed the window, but I didn't dare follow
that way.

"The head of the back stairs, however, was at this end of the corridor. I
ran down them, out through the back door again, across the fields and into
the forest where I had seen the fellow vanish.

"In the storm I couldn't trail him. I shouted, fired off my gun in the
hope Leila would respond. In vain. Then the storm was over, as suddenly as it
had begun. The clouds started to break. Moonlight, sifting through, showed me
trampled bushes, shreds of a girl's clothing caught on briars. I followed
that trail, reached the face of West Cliff. Just above where the spoor ended
I saw the mouth of a cave, thought I sensed movement within it. Possibly, I
thought, my shots had scared the kidnaper away and Leila was alone up there.
I started to climb up to it. Suddenly rocks started to fly down at me. One
struck me on the head. I felt myself falling, struck and lost
consciousness."

IT fitted, Leila thought, his story fitted. Was it the truth
or a tissue of lies? Somehow it explained everything too patly, everything
except who the Monster was and where he had come from, except the mystery of
Eve Starr's weird part in the dreadful night. Eve's face was an
expressionless mask, her unfathomable eyes fixed on Corbett's seamed,
horribly tired countenance.

"When I came to I heard the sounds of struggle, far-off. A pile of dead
leaves had cushioned my fall, I wasn't badly hurt. I staggered to my feet,
ploughed through the woods, and found Stan, knocked out."

Or had he come on that scene just a little earlier, in time to whistle off
Calban, in time to send the Monster ravening after her through the woods. Was
he playing still for a chance to get her alone, to finish her? The
speculation wrenched a groan from the bemused girl.

"Leila!" Eve exclaimed. "You're white. You look as though you were going
to faint. I'll get you some water."

She was out of the room as her sentence ended. The kitchen door swung
closed behind her.

"Leila," Foster Corbett spun to her. "What do you know of Eve's actions
tonight? Have you seen her?"

A scream sliced across her amazing question, a scream from behind the
kitchen door. Corbett slewed around. Gun in hand, he hurled himself across
the room, pounded that door open. The brick-walled room beyond was starkly,
gruesomely vacant, but the back door was just slamming shut and from beyond
it a thin, high wail of infinite terror told where Eve had vanished.

"He's got her, now," the old man yelled. "I was wrong. Come on, Stan!" And
then he, too, was gone into the grisly night.

LEILA MONROY came up out of her chair, fighting the
intangible but cloying threads of her weakness, fighting a giddy nausea that
whirled within her skull and tweaked at the pit of her stomach. Through that
dizzy whirlpool she saw Stan's vague form dart past her, lurched to follow
it. The room seemed to whirl about her as she moved, there was a wall where
the door should be, a wall into which she jolted.

Half-stunned, she pawed at the partition, found the door away from which
she had reeled in her vertigo, reeled through. The kitchen, a place of black,
threatening shadows, danced about her. She staggered across it, stabbed at
the outer door, missed it, pulled in an agonizing breath and tried again.

This time Leila contrived to grab the doorknob as it went by and steadied
herself by it. Gripping the jamb with her other hand, she fought to get the
portal open, succeeded.

Something lay, a black, unmoving bulk, on the porch outside. Stan! It must
be Stan, her bewildered fear jabbed at her and she went to her knees beside
it. She pawed at it, her blurred vision still refusing to clear...

The body came suddenly alive. Rolled over. The apelike, ferocious visage
of the Monster glared at her, black lips curling away from yellow fangs in a
strange, jabbering laugh of bestial triumph.

A scream sliced her throat and then Calban's gigantic arms flailed around
her, crushing her to him, crushing her ribs, damping that scream to silence
in her breathless lungs. He surged to his feet, bringing her up with him as
though she had no weight at all. He lurched back into the house with her.

Through the kitchen, the living room, he ploughed, chuckling lewd glee.
Into the foyer hall he shouldered, the piggish little eyes under his beetling
brows lurid with an obscene light, his calloused, rasping fingers writhing as
though with some vile life of their own on her shrinking, quivering flesh.
Leila's larynx swelled once more with a shriek, but Calban caught her
intention by some unhuman second-sight and gagged her—gagged her
horribly with the pressure of his slobbering, evil lips on hers in a kiss of
ultimate horror.

Crushed thus in the viselike cradle of the beast-man's arms, gagged thus
by his insufferable caress, Leila knew that he was carrying her up the broad
stairs to the passage above. To the passage where her own room was,
her
own bed
—

No doubt now, no doubt at all, of what the brute-man intended.

No doubt of what he intended or of what had happened. He had been waiting
outside, had grabbed Eve and—killed her, probably. Foster Corbett had
taken advantage of the girl's one cry to get out of the way himself, to get
Stan out of the way—and had sent back his creature to finish off Leila.
Stan's unlooked for presence time and time again had interfered with his
macabre plans, but Stan was out of the way now and Leila was in Calban's
power, being carried up to the room where the night's horror had begun and
now would be consummated.

Calban was in the room, thrusting the door shut with a dexterous foot as
he passed through it, twisting to the bed with a swift surety that told of
curious familiarity with its location. Even in that terrible moment Leila
noted that, noted that her white spread was rumpled and blood-flecked, that
the indentation of a contorted figure was still visible on it. Then Calban
had flung her stunningly down on the bed, had pinned her to it with a
digging, cruel knee as he tore avidly at what was left of her clothing.

"Pretty," he jabbered, as he had jabbered before in the forest, "Pretty.
Calban likes."

He paused to gloat over the quivering beauty his violating paws had
revealed. "Calban likes very much."

Leila's tortured eyes fled from the evil anticipation of his thick-lipped,
drooling mouth, slid past the muscles of his terrible arms. Her hopeless gaze
slid along the walls of her familiar room that now was a cell of madness and
despair, reached the door. It was opening! Slowly, silently, it was opening
and white fingers jogged its edge.

The girl's heart leaped.

"Please," she whimpered pulling her gaze back to her tormentor. "Please,
Calban, let me go." At all costs she must distract his attention, keep him
from noticing the advent of her rescuer. "I'll pay you. I'll give you lots of
money, jewels..."

The Monster gibbered his mindless laugh. "Calban no want money, jewels.
Calban want pretty woman, white, soft flesh of pretty woman. Like
this—"

And suddenly he leaped away from her, leaped to the center of the room and
whirled to the opening door. Some sixth sense had warned him of danger...

Stan jumped into the room, a long carving knife in his hand that must have
come from the kitchen below.

"Leila!" he yelled. "Run, jump out of the window. I can hold him long
enough!"

Calban roared, plunged at him. Stan met the attack with a darting slash of
the knife, caught the Monster across the knuckles. The beast-man's other fist
crashed against the trooper's shoulder, slammed him against the wall. Leila
screamed, started up from the bed.

Calban twisted to her. A flick of his long arm pounded her back to the
creaking mattress. Stan rebounded from the wall, sliced at Calban. The giant
sprang backward, avoiding the rush, dropped to the floor and rolled toward
the trooper.

Leila was out of the bed, was darting once more toward the window. Black
digits closed on Stan's ankles, heaved upward. The trooper was flung high
into the air. He twisted lithely, came down on his feet, crouched to meet his
snarling adversary's lunge. Calban's juggernaut rush swerved at the last
instant and the girl felt the impact of his fists once more, blasting her
headlong away from attempted escape. She sprawled, brought up thumping
against the wall.

Stan ducked forward, slashed a long cut across the other's leathery cheek.
Calban squealed, more in rage than pain, and exploded into a swift blur of
action which Leila's eyes could not follow nor Stan avoid. Suddenly that
whirling battle was static, terribly static.

Stan hung from the giant's tight clutch on his wrists, hung from arms
stretched horizontally out from his shoulders in that terrific grip.
Crucified on an invisible cross, the trooper's body was a taut arc of
suffering, his face a fish-belly white, sweat-wet mask of hideous
torture.

A low moan squealed from his rigid throat, squealed into sound. "Get
out—Leila—your chance..." gurgled into a nondescript gust of
agony as Calban's gargantuan span of whipcord muscle widened to crack the
bone-jointures in his shoulders with the gruesome power of its living
torture-rack.

Leila's way to the door was clear as long as Calban held the straddle-
legged pose he must to continue his grisly torment of her lover. This was her
chance to escape.

She shoved away from the wall to which that last fierce buffet had flung
her, came up to her feet. Came up to her feet with the light bedroom chair in
her hands, leaped toward Calban and pounded the improvised weapon down on his
head.

The chair splintered, smashed. Calban let Stan drop and whirled to Leila.
He was laughing, actually he was laughing!

"She-devil," his twitching lips spewed. "Calban like you that way." His
hands lashed out, his fingers dug into the girl's shoulder, sent fiery agony
darting through her twisting, almost nude body. "Calban like woman that can
fight, but can't play now. Must finish with man first. Tear arms out, legs,
like fly's wings."

"No," Leila screamed. "No. Leave him alone. Do what you want with me, but
leave him alone."

Calban's simian visage was distorted by his yellow-toothed, imbecilic
grin. "Calban do what he like with both." She was helpless, infantile in his
great hands as he flung her once more on the bed, as he ripped the sheets
into strips and lashed her ankles, her wrists; lashed them tightly, cruelly,
pulling the knots with sadistic violence. The rough edges of the torn linen
cut into her shrieking flesh, were scarlet-edged with oozing blood.

On the floor behind the savage giant a long shudder ran through Stan
Corbett's crumpled frame, and he was crawling, crawling as a stepped-upon
beetle—might in whom life was not yet quite extinct. But unlike that
beetle the man moved with a definite purpose. A yard beyond his shaking,
bloodless hand lay the knife he had dropped. A yard—to his anguish
enfeebled body that yard was an infinite distance. But if he could reach that
knife...

Leila, seeing, stoppered in her throat the moans of her own agony sought
to wrench from her and contrived a question to hold Calban long enough for
Stan to succeed.

"What will your master say if you harm him? Your master doesn't want you
to...

"Calban have no master," the brute roared, rage flaring into his little
eyes. "No one tell Calban what must or must not do." Dismay pierced Leila as
he twisted away from her, as he lurched toward Stan, whose scrabbling fingers
were still inches away from the knife. "No one..."

The whistle shrilled in, the whistle that twice before had saved Stan. A
vague figure blotted the window's dim rectangle.

"Mr. Corbett," Leila screamed. "He's killing Stan. Calban's
killing..."

IT wasn't Foster Corbett who came surging in through the
aperture. It was Eve! Astoundingly it was Eve. "Calban!" she yelled.

The whistle hadn't stopped the monster this time. He was lifting the
lacerated, almost unconscious man from the floor by one hand, and his other
was at Stan's throat!

"Calban!" Eve cried again. "Stop it!"

The giant paused. Over the limp, lolling frame of his victim he glared at
the dark-haired girl, his face a gargoylesque, demoniac visage.

"No," he chattered. "Calban will not be cheated any more. Calban will kill
the man, and take the woman, and your lies will not stop him again."

"Calban! I did not lie to you." Grotesque, hideous, this colloquy between
the slim, darkly-beautiful girl whom Leila Monroy had known all her life, and
the beetle-browed, barrel-chested savage who was an atavism from the very
dawn of time. "It was you who forgot our bargain and tried to force from me
what I promised would be yours when you finished the task I set you. If you
hadn't attacked me, choked me—"

Oh God! It was blasphemous even to think his name in the presence of that
woman!

"You—you fiend," Leila burst out. "You brought him here to kill me.
You—"

Eve's glance flicked to her, and it stung Leila as if the evil in it were
a barbed whiplash of frozen steel.

"Shut up!" she hissed. "You don't count, now."

Then she was concentrating on the giant.

"Calban," she pleaded, "let him go. Let him live."

Lurid light-worms crawled sinisterly in the brute's small eyes. "No," he
grunted, and his throttling fingers started again to close, bit by cruel bit,
on Stan's throat. "No. You want him, and you'll never give yourself to Calban
while he lives."