The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy (34 page)

They exchanged bows with punctilious formality; and then d’Artois turned and led the way to the Mercedes.

“I am more than ever convinced that in some way he’s responsible. He, or one of his devil mongering clique,” declared d’Artois as he took the wheel.

“But how could he? It’s utterly incredible —”

“Science scoffs at sorcery, glibly explains its manifestations as
hysterical hypnosis,”
countered d’Artois. “But that does not make it any the less magic. Remember what you saw in the moat and how the horoscope confirmed our first impressions. Certainly I am at loss, but Sidi Abdurrahman’s years of study will solve the riddle.

“Maybe,” conceded Barrett, “you’re right. Oddly enough, your remarks didn’t puzzle him as they should have.”

“By no means strange,” retorted d’Artois as they drew up before the apartment of the two sisters. “He knew that I knew.”

A sturdy, white-haired Basque maid admitted them. Yvonne Marigny received them in the living room. Her olive skin was deadly pale, and her dark eyes burned with an unnatural light.

“Yes. The
Sûreté
notified me, just a few minutes after I arrived,” she said with a calmness that was more devastating than any outburst of grief. “I had a premonition of evil when Louise slipped out for a breath of air. And when I sent you to look for her—
mon Dieu!
It was too late.”

“But why did you leave before we returned?”

Yvonne shook her head.

“I don’t know. Just an irresistible urge to get away. To go home. Like the instinct that urges an animal to creep off to its den and die.”

She shuddered, made a perplexed, despairing gesture.

“So…you were almost driven from there,” said d’Artois, speaking very slowly, and glancing meaningly at Barrett. Then his eyes flashed toward the windows and their closely spaced wrought-iron bars. He nodded approvingly; and Barrett caught the unspoken thought.

“Mon vieux,
do you stay here with Mademoiselle Yvonne. I am going to get Sidi Abdurrahman. He lives out beyond the Mousserole Wall, not far off the river road.”

Then, as Barrett accompanied him to the door, he continued in a whisper, “The same strange, unreasoning compulsion that sent Louise to her death may send Yvonne wandering by moonlight. Don’t let her out of the house. Hold her. Tie her, if necessary!”

The door clicked closed behind d’Artois; and a moment later they heard the soft whir of gears.

The proximity of tragedy depressed Barrett. He resolutely directed his eyes away from the barred window, and the moon-drenched mists beyond, and sought to banish the memory of what he had seen in the moat; but a strange fascination forced him to gaze into the ghastly glamour of the night. Barrett shivered, rose from his chair, intending to draw the shades to screen that ill-omened view. Yvonne nodded, sensing his motive, and smiled wanly through the tears that glistened in her dark eyes.

“Monsieur Barrett,” said Yvonne, “this is all so terribly unreal…it is like an awful nightmare. It seems as though all the evil that has ever existed is concentrating about us.”

Thus she described the feeling that Barrett had vainly sought to dispel. He had assured himself that it was but natural for Yvonne, grief-stricken and horrified as she was, to infect him with her own emotions; and yet, that reassurance by no means convinced him.

He noted that the lights were dimming. He frowned perplexedly, and resumed his seat, instead of drawing the shade.

“Bum voltage regulation,” he insisted; but Barrett’s intuition told him that the trouble was not electrical. Then he saw that wisps of mist were swirling and drifting in through the window.

Yvonne stared into the coals of the grate, whose ardent glow had suddenly cooled. The girl herself had become lethargic, as though her spirit had left her. For a moment Barrett felt utterly alone. It was as though Yvonne were a lovely simulacrum and not a woman who shrank shuddering into the depths of her spacious chair.

Gray vapors swirled and surged through the room. A chilling breeze urged the mist whorl into sweeping spirals; mists that came neither from the Nive nor the Adour, nor any earthly river. Barrett thought again of d’Artois’s solemn declaration,
“Saturn, the lord of subterranean places, Neptune, who governs strange spiritual enemies, and malignant Uranus, rule this night.”

Barrett stepped to the center of the room, where he could see the double windows that overlooked the Lachepaillet Walk. He saw a monstrous shape peering at him as, perched on the sill, it clutched the window-bars and slowly wrenched them apart.

The walls had become obscured with dense, vibrant mist banks, so that only in the center of the room was any light left. The incandescent lamps were now a dull, somber red that vainly sought to filter through the surging haze.

The creature’s feet identified it as the monster of the moat.

Barrett saw now what had torn Louise’s throat and drunk her blood, then taken three long strides and —

It had spread its membranous bat-wings and soared into the moonlight, and thence to whatever unknown hell had sent it forth. The face was anthropoid, but malignant, beyond the bestial wrath of any honest ape. The body was hybrid, neither reptilian nor simian: a blasphemy and an outrage whose hideously confused anatomy was all the more abhorrent in its mingling of hair and scales.

The feet were almost human at the heel, but branched into three claw-like toes, joined by webs. Beast it was, yet bird, and reptile. The hands were similarly formed, with arms long enough to accommodate the broad sweep of the membranous wings.

Barrett knew that the creature had no thought for him. He knew that he could then and there stride safe and harmless through the ever-thickening mist banks, past the somber, vengeful forms that leered out of the haze, and pass on, unmolested. The beast ignored him. It advanced with a slow, fluent, serpentine motion that was entirely out of accord with its grotesque, awkward bulk. It paused, ready to spring forward and rend Yvonne’s throat, mutilate her as it had her sister.

The Basque maid, alarmed by Yvonne’s single shriek of mortal terror, came running in, stared in incredulous horror. Then she screamed and collapsed on the threshold.

As the monster lunged toward Yvonne, who was paralyzed by the apparition, Barrett seized a heavy chair and lashed out, shattering it across the simian skull. The beast recoiled, sank back to its haunches, shook its head as though bewildered.

Barrett stood for an instant regarding the fragments that remained in his grasp. Then in a flare of rage born of terror and outraged reason, he charged, driving the splintered stumps full into the monster’s face.

The assault was vain. He had disconcerted the beast more than he had shaken it. It lashed out with arms that reached almost to its ankles, and enfolded Barrett with its shroud of membranous wings. It screeched and hissed in inarticulate fury. Its long carnivorous teeth sought his throat, even as Barrett, beyond terror or reason, evaded the fangs and sought to throttle the beast, and tear it to pieces with his bare hands.

It was a mad dream of combat in a steaming, prehistoric jungle. The reptilian exhalation of the monster, its squeaking, gibbering wrath and the stifling embrace of its wings, drove Barrett to an insane rage. The thing was strong, but not beyond the strength of human wrath spurred to frenzy; and the very horror of its presence stirred up reserves of destructive fury whose force was dimly echoed in Barrett’s ears as he heard the splintering of furniture that crashed and fell into fragments as he and the monster rolled and leaped, broke, and closed in again, seeking each other’s throat.

And yet for all his rage-inspired strength and agility, Barrett vainly sought to rend that tough, scaly body which yielded instead of tearing or breaking as he applied in succession, one after another savage trick of wrestling, and murderous holds practiced by Japanese experts. Though, it could not quite overcome Barrett, it resisted the full flame of his fury. Its endurance was unflagging, and its counter attacks fresh and vigorous as from the start. It seemed to gain strength from Barrett’s blood, which streamed from a score of cuts and scratches and long, ragged furrows gouged by its teeth.

Barrett’s strength at last was consumed by the futility of his rage. As in a confused dream, his mind began double-tracking: one half still a vortex of flaming wrath, the other impersonally pondering on d’Artois’s astrological observations. He knew that this division of consciousness heralded the end of his resistance; and exerting an ultimate, despairing effort, sought to sink his teeth into the monster’s throat. But the mists blackened, and the enemy evaded him. His arms clutched a void of abysmal coldness shot with burn­ing flashes of scarlet and orange and dazzling, metallic blue. Then it seemed that he was falling swiftly through unbounded space…and as from a great distance he heard a long drawn wail of uttermost terror.

III.

The Savor of Blood

When Barrett finally regained consciousness he saw that the lights were bright again. D’Artois, kneeling at his side, was sponging his wounds.

“…all in the approach,” a calm, deep voice was saying. “Your friend—though God alone knows how—withstood the beast by pure force of will to slay. But that was misguided effort.”

Barrett with a sudden effort propped himself up on his elbow to confront the person who so lightly disposed of that nightmare battle with that monster from an unknown hell; but his strength was unequal to his curiosity, and he sank back to the floor.

D’Artois helped him to his feet. Barrett, still dazed, for a moment had assumed that d’Artois’s presence left victory to be taken for granted; but a second glance at his friend’s grim features and despair haunted eyes told him the truth.

“Where is she?” he demanded, stubbornly resisting his fears. “Good Lord, did it —”

And then Barrett saw d’Artois’s companion, Sidi Abdur­rahman. Despite the freshness of the occultist’s bronzed skin, he seemed incredibly ancient. Barrett’s first impression was that some solemn Assyrian colossus had come to life. The neatly trimmed, square-cut beard added to the resemblance; only the tall miter was lacking. For an instant Barrett’s despair subsided; and then he remembered that d’Artois had failed.

“Where is she?” he repeated. “We can’t stand here, idle.”

“We do not know—yet,” replied the
Chêla,
unperturbed by Barrett’s impatient outburst. “But there are ways of finding out. First, be so good as to clear the floor.”

Barrett shot a dubious glance at d’Artois. His friend’s answering nod was reassuring. And while they cleared away the wreckage of the furniture, Sidi Abdurrahman laid off a circle which he subdivided into seven sectors, and about which he drew a concentric circle.

“As I was saying a few moments ago,” resumed the occultist, “fighting that monster was misdirected effort. We must find its master; for even though we destroyed the beast, body and soul, he would create —”

“Soul?”
exclaimed Barrett. “That —”

“Yes. We are confronted by the recrudescence of an ancient evil that began among the Black Magicians of Atlantis. It is written in the occult records:
The Atlanteans had become magicians who created monsters with the strength of the brute and the cunning of the savage; and these they ensouled with the most malignant of elementals, who became guards and messengers, the terrible symbols of the power of the Kings of Darkness.

“To bind these dread beings more closely to their service, they offered them sacrifices of slain animals and slain men. Fifty thousand years passed: and then the Dragons of Wisdom sent a doom forth from Holy Shamballah.“

“Is that creature fifty thousand years old?” wondered Barrett.

The
Chêla
smiled and shook his head.

“That is only the time during which the Black Masters were at the height of their power. They were destroyed something like 850,000 years ago when the word went forth from Shamballah. And as it was done then, so must we do now: make the slave betray the master,” continued Sidi Abdurrahman as he drew a seven-pointed star in the innermost circle.

“We will bribe and drug that monster with blood. It shall find its doom in the very evil by which it has lived all these ages; it cannot resist the bait; and instead of warning its master, it will lead us to him.”

“For a Mohammedan,” whispered Barrett as the
Chêla
reached for a small copper bowl which he had brought with him, “he certainly is unorthodox.”

“Mordieu!
Who said he was a Moslem?” countered d’Ar­tois. “His name signifies nothing. He gets his knowledge from study of occult records which are the fountainhead of learning, and transcend race and religion.”

Sidi Abdurrahman set the bowl at the center of the circles; then he cast into it the contents of a small packet: a fine, bluish powder.

That done, he drew a dagger, saying, “This will be its last drink of blood! And it cannot refuse the bait; for such is the law of its kind.”

But before the keen blade touched the vein of the
Chêla’s
forearm, Barrett interposed.

“Let me in on this,” he said, thrusting forward his own arm.

“No. I have an old debt to pay. One contracted in a former life, by a former failure. Just is the Wheel, and unswerving and this is my debt.”

With the evening’s earlier madness, Barrett found the occultist’s reference to a previous incarnation entirely rational. He stepped back as the blade bit, and the old man’s blood spurted redly into the copper bowl.

When the bowl was filled to the brim, d’Artois stepped forward and with a handkerchief and lead pencil devised a tourniquet to check the flow.

They watched the occultist bow ceremonially to the cardinal points of the compass, and make ritual gestures. They heard him intone,
“The hour has struck, and the black night is ready…let their destiny be accomplished
.…”

And then Barrett could no longer understand the
Chêla’s
utterance. The sonorous, majestic intonation was in a tongue so foreign and archaic that it seemed not even remotely related to any speech of mankind.