The sounds grew wilder. The thud of naked feet upon the earth was audible, like a buffalo stampede. Wilder and wilder grew the shouting, and then suddenly the part of the temple behind the curtain was filled with a shrieking crowd.
Above the sounds Jim could hear that of the woman, Marian’s voice.
Then suddenly the curtain was pulled away on either side, sliding on a taut rope of rattan. And Jim saw the front part of the temple.
All around the sides were the grotesque figures of Hindu gods. The tallest of them stood immediately before the bed. Jim could see only the back of a female figure, before which was a long, flat altar. And on the altar stood Marian, almost nude.
Before her all the Dyaks were assembled, cramming every inch of the stone temple, all gazing up at her with rapt attention and rolling eyes, while wild peals broke from their throats.
Slowly the woman raised an earthen goblet to her lips and drank from it. Then each man of the crowd came forward, stooping to knock head against the floor, and drank from two huge fiber pails containing the potion.
Marian spoke, and the hall grew still as death. The eyeballs were the only things that moved, flashes of whiteness in the brown faces.
She was speaking names, and, one by one, ten of the natives detached themselves from the crowd and came forward to the altar. And a thrill of shame and horror ran through Jim as he realized what this meant.
She waved her hand, and suddenly wild yells rang forth, and the rest of the crowd ran leaping out of the temple. She spoke to the ten men, who prostrated themselves again and knocked their heads upon the floor.
They rose and stood in line before her, their rolling eyes following each movement of her sinuous body. The twitching muscles showed that the drug had already taken effect. Its sensuous effects were shown in the slavering lips, the quiver of the lithe brown forms.
Marian turned and walked to where Jim lay, apparently helpless in his bonds. The earthen goblet was in her hands. She placed it to his lips.
“Drink,” she said softly, crooningly. “Drink, my beloved.” Her eyes were hot upon his face.
With one bound Jim had leaped from the bed, shaking off the rattan ropes. He dashed the goblet from the woman’s hands. He dealt her a buffet that sent her sprawling among the slavering brown men.
Then, kriss in hand, he ran toward the wall.
Marian shrieked, and instantly the ten were galvanized into demoniac fury. They leaped toward Jim.
But the wall was opening—opening…
Jim turned, the kriss flashed in the lamplight, and, with a scream, the foremost of the Dyaks dropped, stabbed through the belly. Jim wrenched the kriss free. The wall was open now. He leaped through, and saw Mary Alice standing on the other side.
Howling like devils, the nine, with Marian in their midst, sprang for the aperture. One leaped through, and again the kriss rose and fell, and another Dyak lay at Jim’s feet, his life-blood gushing from a frightful wound in the throat. Another sprang, and got wedged in the revolving stones. For an instant the mechanism ceased; then it went on, and the mangled, screeching thing that had been a man dropped in a dark mass on the other side as the aperture closed, shutting off completely the sound of the shrieking, raving madwoman and her companions.
Mary Alice was standing against the wall of a stone corridor, a little butter-lamp in her hand. The shapeless thing at Jim’s feet neither cried nor stirred.
“Quick, Tuan, quick! Our chance is small, but I know the way, for I went with Hassan once to the very edge of the pass, after he gave me the key of my room.”
She almost dragged him after her, down a flight of ancient steps, then along a tunnel, littered with great fallen blocks of stone. At last, where stone completely blocked the tunnel, the moonlight appeared through ail opening overhead.
Jim scrambled up the rough blocks, found his head above ground, stooped, and hoisted up the girl. A scramble, and they emerged some hundred feet from the extreme edge of the stone fort, with the scrub-covered base of the mountains close at hand.
“This way, Tuan, this way!” sobbed the girl.
Jim stopped for an instant, caught her to him, felt her breasts strained against his, and kissed her. And that was the moment of discovery.
Wild, maniacal shrieks indicated that the madwoman had shrewdly guessed their course. In the moonlight Jim could see at least fifty of the Dyaks streaming in pursuit.
He ran as he had never run before, but a white man, hampered with boots, could hardly hope to outrun a native on his own ground; the woman, Marian, ran with the swiftest of the natives, and Mary Alice, with long years of imprisonment behind her, could hardly run at all.
Already spears were whizzing past Jim’s head. And the pass by which he had come—he could guess its location—was still far away.
“Run! Run!” Jim shouted to Mary Alice, and then planted himself, kriss in hand, directly in the path of the oncoming savages.
The madwoman’s shrieks rose above the din. She was calling to her followers, and Jim guessed what she was telling them. They were to take him alive, reserve him for the torture she had meant for him all the time.
The spears no longer flew. But the natives were coming on. They were about twenty feet away from him, and Jim braced himself for the last fight.
He was no longer conscious of Mary Alice.
Then suddenly the roar of firearms drowned the yells. The front rank of the natives melted away. Firearms? No, a machine-gun, manned by half-a-dozen brown men under command of a white, bearded officer.
Again, again those staccato blasts ripped through the air. The savages had turned to flee, but there was no flight for them. Swiftly, inexorably, as a reaper mows, they were cut down, until the last man dropped among his companions on that bloodstained field.
Only one figure tottered to Jim’s feet and collapsed there. It was Marian, and the whole upper portion of her body had almost been blown to pieces.
“Save her! Forgive!” she whispered, and sobbed, and died. But the madness seemed to have been gone from her face.
Jim swung about, to see Mary Alice in the grasp of the white officer. He was leading her toward Jim, Tim recognized the face beneath the white sun-helmet. It was that of Mynheer van Stent.
“Und so you outwitted us, you thought, eh?” grinned the Dutchman a little later, as Jim sprawled upon the ground at the head of the pass. He was feeling better, distinctly better, with a bottle of champagne, ice-cold from the thermos flask into which it had been emptied, inside him. And much better because Mary Alice was seated beside him, and her hand was in his own.
“Id seems to haf been even worse than I expected,” continued Heer van Stent. “And if I had let you go to your death, your Government would have raised hell with mine Government, and I should have been recalled. But who is this young lady? She will not talk to me.”
Jim explained, and the Dutchman’s eyes opened wide. “So the daughter was not massacred, and she kept her all these years alive,” he said. “Well, it is a fortunate thing all around.”
“But how did you get here? How did you find the pass?” Jim asked.
Van Stent laughed. “When you left your coat behind you, I took the liberty of going through your pockets, and I found this,” he answered. “So I took my men by plane to the foot of the pass, and then we come up—just in time.”
And he held up in front of Jim’s eyes the leaf with the message and the map.
Jim made some murmur of understanding. Van Stent got up and moved away. Perhaps he understood that look in Jim’s eyes as he looked at Mary Alice.
He drew her to him, felt her rounded breasts against his chest, and heard the quick thudding of her heart. “My wife—my little wife!” he whispered.
LUST TO KILL, by Jose Vaca
Originally published in Spicy Adventure, March 1937.
Collins leaned against a r
uined doorway and retched in the early Spanish dawn. His stomach was a ball of ice bouncing viciously, his nerves hot wires stretched taut, trembling, screaming. With shaking fingers he lifted the black velvet patch that covered the place where his right eye had once been, dabbed weakly at the empty socket. Ken Collins, soldier of fortune, had left that eye in the fastnesses of the Atlas ranges as the result of a comrade’s desertion, but it still ached when desolation such as this came into being.
The little plaza of the ruined Spanish town was a shambles. Awnings hung in taunting, fingerlike tatters from twisted supports, shattered glass, bricks and mortar littered the streets. Every building bore its share of pockmarks, jagged bullet holes resulting from the merciless street fighting of the last two days.
There were humans in that shattered square, but the one that breathed, the only one that would ever awaken to meet the cold magic of Spanish dawn was Collins, the Loyalist aviator, whose skill was for sale to the highest bidder, whose profession was death and destruction.
Now he leaned against the doorway and retched, his whipcord uniform and smart boots the only moving spot of color.
Except for the vultures.
They plodded like fat ducks from one delectable feast to another, their evil eyes glazed from the sating, their red necks like rings of blood on scrawny, dirty fingers.
Against the far wall lay the corpses of three boys, staring upward at the gray sky, faces twisted, contorted by the last pangs of life. But the black holes that peered owlishly into the dawn were merely empty sockets. The vultures had seen to that.
In a doorway across the street the brown, abused body of a young woman half lay, half sat. Clothes had been ripped from her. A bayonet still clung in the hideous wound between two cold breasts, the butt of the heavy rifle causing the body to sit half erect. Rigor mortis had set in long ago. The nude corpse swayed grotesquely.
Collins raised the canteen that hung at his side, gulped once, twice. The cognac was like water in his dry throat, but the alcohol warmed the icy coldness of his stomach. Collins’ little car was parked a street away; he had driven in from the air field in the grey light to view the desolation of the town. He was morbidly fascinated, had been growing more and more so through the days of the vicious revolution.
As a matter of fact Collins was tired of slaughter, tired of the war that had filled his life since the days of the Great Push. But he didn’t know it. He knew only that his nerves were on edge, that the stench of death, the sight of death sickened him, yet fascinated him irresistibly. He turned slowly away, trying not to see the mutilated corpses, the torn faces, the gorging vultures.
Something squeaked beneath his very feet. The blood drained from his face. A giant rat crouched away from him, beady eyes venomous, sharp teeth gleaming whitely although its mouth was filled with a great strip of purple flesh torn from a corpse.
Collins rocked with laughter and as the rat turned and hurdled carrion, drew his heavy automatic and shot the clip empty. The rat exploded, a surprised vulture awked even as its head flew from its body. Another tried to waddle away, too gorged to fly, and met fitting death instead of escape.
Trembling, Collins reloaded, the sweat dripping off his nose, his chin, his nervous fingers refusing to answer the instructions of his brain. He had barely gotten the clip home, and was turning to go, when a car roared into the plaza, bumped two corpses and came to a stop.
Two men leaped from the front seat, men in civilian clothes, clutching automatic rifles. A third leaped from the rear, a man in uniform, an automatic in his hand. To Collins’ hysterical brain they were simply something more at which to shoot. His first shot caught one of the civilians between the eyes; his automatic rifle clattered to the cobbles.
The little man in uniform leaped shrieking into the tonneau of the car: the second civilian raised his weapon.
“Kill, kill,” screamed Collins. “Blood! Death you wanted, damn you! Death!” The automatic rifle clattered only a short burst, for the user sprawled to the pavement. Unscathed Collins leaped forward, Luger still blazing. The little officer in the tonneau of the car crouched, leveled his own gun across the door.
A corpse saved Collins’ life, for as the man fired pointblank Collins stumbled, went to his knees. Coming up he threw his emptied gun in the officer’s face, sprang into the tonneau and gripped a throat with sinewy fingers.
“Kill, kill,” he screamed. His teeth closed on flesh. The man beneath him screamed as those relentless fingers demanded and received their toll.
Only when there was no movement beneath him did the crazed aviator release his victim. Stupidly he sat up, breathed deeply. The canteen again, a long drink. He spread his hands, gazed at iron fingers and giggled. His laugh was eerie, inane, the laughter of a demented one. Slaughter and horror had touched Collins’ brain. He looked down at the man in the floor of the car and for the first time the light of reason appeared in his one eye. He sprang up as if he had seen a ghost. “No! No!” he muttered. “Christo!”
The man who stared up at him was General Alfredo Gonzales, leader of the Loyalist troops in that sector. Collins had killed his own superior officer.
The wave of insanity swept over him again. He began to laugh. Slowly, he made his way across the square, still laughing, his demented mind rambling. “Kill me,” he screamed, “they’ll shoot me, torture me! I did it! I did it!”
Footsteps?
Blindly, blankly he ran, stumbling, falling to his knees, arising and running on. The black doorway of a large house. He missed it, hit the wall instead, fell back into the street and lay still beside the mutilated corpse of a girl of sixteen.
The sun was just peeping over the shattered rooftops. Collins’ twisted strangely grotesque in the early morning sunshine.
For long moments there was silence in the square broken only by the squeaking rats. A red necked vulture circled low, lit on a rock, eyed Collins’ still form. He lunged forward on six foot flapping wings, alighted on Collins’ left boot. Collins twitched. The bird withdrew a few feet, paused to eye the recumbent man hungrily.
A woman ran from the large house, a broken chair in her hand. She cursed the vulture, frightened it from its intended prey, knelt beside the unconscious American. She wore a tattered evening gown, black in contrast to the olive of her flesh. The skirt, rent and torn exposed the smoothness of a full fleshed thigh as she knelt, the rise, and fall of olive breasts.
She called, “Come, Carlotta, it is the aviator, the one-eyed man of America. Help me, help me?”
Another woman appeared in the bleak doorway, cautiously peering up and down the square before approaching. Her solitary garment was a lacy mantilla that circled rounded shoulders, only half obscured trembling breasts and lyre-like hips. She leaned above the fallen man, said “Madre de Dios, Luisa, he has killed Gonzales! We dare not help him. Even now—”
“Take his feet, fool! We’ll need him, we can use him. He isn’t dead! Hurry!”
Scarcely had they disappeared with their sagging burden when a motorcycle shot into the plaza. The uniformed rider found the dead general, fled as if the devil pursued. But ten minutes later the place swarmed with Loyalist soldiers, enraged, blood thirsty, aching for revenge. Every ruin, every battered shop was searched. Trim Lieutenant Rosinante, a squad at his heels entered a certain black doorway to find a blonde woman calmly eating breakfast of hard bread and wine. The blonde woman’s only covering was a black lace mantilla, which she carelessly let remain the way it was. Breasts quivered as her arms moved. She smiled lazily, said, “Good morning, lieutenant. You come early. You wish to see Carlotta, Luisa?”
The lieutenant allowed his hot eyes to rove over exposed charms. Gallantly he said, “Señorita, I will undoubtedly return tonight! But now we search for the killer of El General Gonzales.” He launched into rapid Spanish describing the death of their leader. How one of the civilians accompanying him had only been wounded,
how he had described the one eyed man in the aviator’s uniform who was undoubtedly that Americano turned traitor. Wide eyed the blonde Carlotta listened, shrugged shapely shoulders and pouted.
“You soldiers! Adventures, you have adventures! And little Carlotta lies sleeping while all this happens! Share a drink with me, lieutenant, and tell me you have caught the murderers when you come again tonight.” What could a gallant soldier do?
Behind the door, ear pressed to the wall, the woman, Luisa, sat tense and taut on a great Moorish chest. Her body ached, her breasts throbbed with the intensity of her fear and hope. For within the chest lay the six foot body of Ken Collins, soldier of fortune, whom this woman desired so greatly to save. Luisa had uses for an aviator, even though he was a little crazed, even though he had but one eye. She heard the lieutenant and his squad depart, leaped from the chest, threw back the lid. Her anxious fingers found a faint heartbeat in the great breast beneath her. She smiled contentedly.
* * * *
But when the admiring lieutenant came that night he met not the alluring blonde, but the demure Luisa, radiant in a new dress that clung like a sheath to full hips, that exposed the upper slopes of olive breasts to admiring eyes. The lieutenant sat beside her on a divan, drank wine with her and boasted of his exploits.
These rebels, poof! They were nothing! These generals, Blanco, Mola and Cabenellas! Poof! The Loyalists, the Reds, would soon have them driven into the sea where fish would eat the carrion! Yes, war was cruel, but war was necessary to strong men! The Señorita Luisa was so sympathetic, so complimentary, that the pouter-pigeon lieutenant was quite enchanted. It was almost dawn when he took his departure, and the sloe eyed Luisa smiled grimly after him, pulled her disarrayed clothing about her body and went into another room.
A little later, following the lieutenant’s orders, a soldier mounted guard at the door, for the Señorita Luisa was quite annoyed by the constant searching parties of Loyalists who persisted in scouring the city for the one eyed killer of their leader.
The Spicy-Adventure Page 27
