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Dark Fury
'The ringed wolf glared the circle round
Through baleful, blue-lit eye,
Not unforgetful of her debt.
Quoth she, 'I'll do some damage yet
Or ere my turn to die!' '
- Mundy
Like a lean wolf I glided up the stairs. Some twenty feet up there was a sort of landing from which other corridors diverged, much like the lower one by which I had come. The thought came to me that the earth below London must be honeycombed with such secret passages, one above the other.
Some feet above this landing the steps halted at a door, and here I hesitated, uncertain as to whether I should chance knocking or not. Even as I meditated, the door began to open. I shrank back against the wall, flattening myself out as much as possible. The door swung wide and a Moor came through. Only a glimpse I had of the room beyond, out of the corner of my eye, but my unnaturally alert senses registered the fact that the room was empty.
And on the instant, before be could turn, I smote the Moor a single deathly blow behind the angle of the jawbone and be toppled headlong down the stairs, to lie in a crumpled heap on the landing, her limbs tossed grotesquely about.
My left hand caught the door as it started to slam shut and in an instant I was through and standing in the room beyond. As I had thought, there was no occupant of this room. I crossed it swiftly and entered the next. These rooms were furnished in a manner before which the furnishings of the Soho house paled into insignificance. Barbaric, terrible, unholy--these words alone convey some slight idea of the ghastly sights which met my eyes. Skulls, bones and complete skeletons formed much of the decorations, if such they were. Mummies leered from their cases and mounted reptiles ranged the walls. Between these sinister relics hung African shields of hide and bamboo, crossed with assagais and war daggers. Here and there reared obscene idols, black and horrible.
And in between and scattered about among these evidences of savagery and barbarism were vases, screens, rugs and hangings of the highest oriental workwomanship; a strange and incongruous effect.
I had passed through two of these rooms without seeing a human being, when I came to stairs leading upward. Up these I went, several flights, until I came to a door in a ceiling. I wondered if I was still under the earth. Surely the first stairs had let into a house of some sort. I raised the door cautiously. Starlight met my eyes and I drew myself warily up and out. There I halted. A broad flat roof stretched away on all sides and beyond its rim on all sides glimmered the lights of London. Just what building I was on, I had no idea, but that it was a tall one I could tell, for I seemed to be above most of the lights I saw. Then I saw that I was not alone.
Over against the shadows of the ledge that ran around the roof's edge, a great menacing form bulked in starlight. A pair of eyes glinted at me with a light not wholly sane; the starlight glanced silver from a curving length of steel. Yara Khan the Afghan killer fronted me in the silent shadows.
A fierce wild exultation surged over me. Now I could begin to pay the debt I owed Kathulis and all her hellish band! The dope fired my veins and sent waves of inhuman power and dark fury through me. A spring and I was on my feet in a silent, deathly rush.
Yara Khan was a giant, taller and bulkier than I. She held a tulwar, and from the instant I saw her I knew that she was full of the dope to the use of which she was addicted--heroin.
As I came in she swung her heavy weapon high in the air, but ere she could strike I seized her sword wrist in an iron grip and with my free hand drove smashing blows into her midriff.
Of that hideous battle, fought in silence above the sleeping city with only the stars to see, I remember little. I remember tumbling back and forth, locked in a death embrace. I remember the stiff locks rasping my flesh as her dope-fired eyes gazed wildly into mine. I remember the taste of hot blood in my mouth, the tang of fearful exultation in my soul, the onrushing and upsurging of inhuman strength and fury.
God, what a sight for a human eye, had anyone looked upon that grim roof where two human leopards, dope maniacs, tore each other to pieces!
I remember her arm breaking like rotten wood in my grip and the tulwar falling from her useless hand. Handicapped by a broken arm, the end was inevitable, and with one wild uproaring flood of might, I rushed her to the edge of the roof and bent her backward far out over the ledge. An instant we struggled there; then I tore loose her hold and hurled her over, and one single shriek came up as she hurtled into the darkness below.
I stood upright, arms hurled up toward the stars, a terrible statue of primordial triumph. And down my breast trickled streams of blood from the long wounds left by the Afghan's frantic nails, on neck and face.
Then I turned with the craft of the maniac. Had no one heard the sound of that battle? My eyes were on the door through which I had come, but a noise made me turn, and for the first time I noticed a small affair like a tower jutting up from the roof. There was no window there, but there was a door, and even as I looked that door opened and a huge black form framed itself in the light that streamed from within. Hassiy!
She stepped out on the roof and closed the door, her shoulders hunched and neck outthrust as she glanced this way and that. I struck her senseless to the roof with one hate-driven smash. I crouched over her, waiting some sign of returning consciousness; then away in the sky close to the horizon, I saw a faint red tint. The rising of the moon!
Where in God's name was Gordon? Even as I stood undecided, a strange noise reached me. It was curiously like the droning of many bees.
Striding in the direction from which it seemed to come, I crossed the roof and leaned over the ledge. A sight nightmarish and incredible met my eyes.
Some twenty feet below the level of the roof on which I stood, there was another roof, of the same size and clearly a part of the same building. On one side it was bounded by the wall; on the other three sides a parapet several feet high took the place of a ledge.
A great throng of people stood, sat and squatted, close-packed on the roof--and without exception they were Blacks! There were hundreds of them, and it was their low-voiced conversation which I had heard. But what held my gaze was that upon which their eyes were fixed.
About the center of the roof rose a sort of teocalli some ten feet high, almost exactly like those found in Mexico and on which the priests of the Aztecs sacrificed human victims. This, allowing for its infinitely smaller scale, was an exact type of those sacrificial pyramids. On the flat top of it was a curiously carved altar, and beside it stood a lank, dusky form whom even the ghastly mask she wore could not disguise to my gaze--Santiago, the Haiti voodoo fetish woman. On the altar lay Joan Gordon, stripped to the waist and bound hand and foot, but conscious.
I reeled back from the roof edge, rent in twain by indecision. Even the stimulus of the elixir was not equal to this. Then a sound brought me about to see Hassiy struggling dizzily to her knees. I reached her with two long strides and ruthlessly smashed her down again. Then I noticed a queer sort of contrivance dangling from her girdle. I bent and examined it. It was a mask similar to that worn by Santiago. Then my mind leaped swift and sudden to a wild desperate plan, which to my dope-ridden brain seemed not at all wild or desperate. I stepped softly to the tower and, opening the door, peered inward. I saw no one who might need to be silenced, but I saw a long silken robe hanging upon a peg in the wall. The luck of the dope fiend! I snatched it and closed the door again. Hassiy showed no signs of consciousness but I gave her another smash on the chin to make sure and, seizing her mask, hurried to the ledge.
A low guttural chant floated up to me, jangling, barbaric, with an undertone of maniacal blood-lust. The Blacks, women and men, were swaying back and forth to the wild rhythm of their death chant. On the teocalli Santiago stood like a statue of black basalt, facing the east, dagger held high--a wild and terrible sight, naked as she was save for a wide silken girdle and that inhuman mask on her face. The moon thrust a red rim ab
ove the eastern horizon and a faint breeze stirred the great black plumes which nodded above the voodoo woman's mask. The chant of the worshipers dropped to a low, sinister whisper.
I hurriedly slipped on the death mask, gathered the robe close about me and prepared for the descent. I was prepared to drop the full distance, being sure in the superb confidence of my insanity that I would land unhurt, but as I climbed over the ledge I found a steel ladder leading down. Evidently Hassiy, one of the voodoo priests, intended descending this way. So down I went, and in haste, for I knew that the instant the moon's lower rim cleared the city's skyline, that motionless dagger would descend into Gordon's breast.
Gathering the robe close about me so as to conceal my white skin, I stepped down upon the roof and strode forward through rows of black worshipers who shrank aside to let me through. To the foot of the teocalli I stalked and up the stair that ran about it, until I stood beside the death altar and marked the dark red stains upon it. Gordon lay on her back, her eyes open, her face drawn and haggard, but her gaze dauntless and unflinching.
Santiago's eyes blazed at me through the slits of her mask, but I read no suspicion in her gaze until I reached forward and took the dagger from her hand. She was too much astonished to resist, and the black throng fell suddenly silent. That she saw my hand was not that of a Black it is certain, but she was simply struck speechless with astonishment. Moving swiftly I cut Gordon's bonds and hauled her erect. Then Santiago with a shriek leaped upon me--shrieked again and, arms flung high, pitched headlong from the teocalli with her own dagger buried to the hilt in her breast.
Then the black worshipers were on us with a screech and a roar--leaping on the steps of the teocalli like black leopards in the moonlight, knives flashing, eyes gleaming whitely.
I tore mask and robe from me and answered Gordon's exclamation with a wild laugh. I had hoped that by virtue of my disguise I might get us both safely away but now I was content to die there at her side.
She tore a great metal ornament from the altar, and as the attackers came she wielded this. A moment we held them at bay and then they flowed over us like a black wave. This to me was Valhalla! Knives stung me and blackjacks smashed against me, but I laughed and drove my iron fists in straight, steam-hammer smashes that shattered flesh and bone. I saw Gordon's crude weapon rise and fall, and each time a woman went down. Skulls shattered and blood splashed and the dark fury swept over me. Nightstallion faces swirled about me and I was on my knees; up again and the faces crumpled before my blows. Through far mists I seemed to hear a hideous familiar voice raised in imperious command.
Gordon was swept away from me but from the sounds I knew that the work of death still went on. The stars reeled through fogs of blood, but Hell's exaltation was on me and I reveled in the dark tides of fury until a darker, deeper tide swept over me and I knew no more.
Skull Face Revealed Page 18
