by Cave, Hugh
Somewhere in the bowels of the house, under the floor, a revolver roared twice in quick succession. A voice—Jeremy's voice—bellowed in triumph. A long shrill scream vibrated high above everything else. There was a splintering crash as of a door breaking from its hinges—and footsteps on the stairs, running.
Paul hurled himself upon the bluish monstrosity which hung over Ruth's limp body. Wildly, desperately, he leaped forward, thrusting the cross straight into those boring eyes.
Something foul and fetid assailed his nostrils as he tripped and fell to the floor. He rolled over frantically, groping for the bits of white rag which had been torn from his hands on the bedpost as he fell. He knew that Ruth was flat against the wall, holding out both arms to embrace the earth-born fiend which advanced toward her. Her hands were empty. She had let the cross fall. She was no longer a woman, but a human without a will, utterly hypnotized by the eyes.
Paul's fingers found the bit of white rag. Instinctively he twisted backward over the floor, avoiding the uncouth hands that sought his throat. Then he was on his feet, leaping to Ruth's side. Even as that ghoulish mouth lowered to fasten on the girl's throat, the cross intervened. The mouth recoiled with a snarl of awful rage.
"Back!" Paul screamed. "Look, it is daylight!"
The snarling shape stiffened abruptly, as if unseen fingers had snatched at it.
"Daylight!" The word was a thin frightened whisper, lashing through the room and echoing sibilantly. The green eyes filled with apprehension. Suddenly, where the distorted shapes of swirling mist had stood, appeared men—the same men, Costillan and Maronaine, with faces of utter hate. The candlelight was not needed to reveal them now. The room was dim and cold with a thin gray glare from the window.
"Daylight," Costillan muttered, staring fixedly at the aperture. "We have only a moment, Maronaine. Come quickly."
His companion was standing with clenched hands, confronting the two prisoners.
"You have not won," he was saying harshly. "You will never escape. To the ends of hell we will follow you for what you have done this night."
"Come, Maronaine. Quickly!"
"Yours will be the most horrible of all deaths. I warn you—"
A mighty crash shook the door, and another. With sharp cries the two undead creatures whirled about. Triumphantly, Paul knew the thoughts in their malignant minds. They were demons of the night, these fiends. Their hours of existence endured only from sunset to sunrise. If they were not back in their graves....
And now they were trapped, as the barrier clattered inward, torn and splintered from its hinges. A battering ram of human flesh—Jeremy—hurtled over the threshold. Other figures crowded in the doorway.
And suddenly the two vampires were gone. Even as the men in the corridor rushed forward, the twin shapes of black and white vanished. And only Paul saw the method of it. Only Paul saw the black-winged things that swirled with lightning speed through the aperture, into the gloom of the corridor beyond.
12. The Vault
Strong hands held Paul up then. Jeremy and Martin LeGeurn stood beside him, supporting him. Kermeff was on his knees beside the limp unconscious form on the floor. And a stranger, a huge man with bearded face and great thick shoulders, was standing like a mastodon in the center of the room, glaring about him—Von Heller, the mightiest brain in medical circles; the man who understood what other men merely feared.
"Where are they?" he roared, whirling upon Paul. "Stand up, man. You're not hurt. Where did they go?"
"It was daylight," Paul whispered weakly. "They—"
"Daylight?" Von Heller swung savagely to face the window. "My God, what a fool I—Where are the cellars? Hurry. Take me to the cellars."
To Paul it was a blurred dream. He knew that strong hands gripped him and led him rapidly to the door. He heard Von Heller's booming voice commanding Kermeff to remain with the girl. Then moving shapes were all about him. Jeremy was close on one side. Martin LeGeurn was supporting him on the other, talking to him in a low voice of encouragement. Von Heller was striding furiously down the corridor.
The darkness here was as opaque as before, as thick and deep as the gloom of sunken dungeons. But there was no sound in the house; no sound anywhere, except Paul's own voice, muttering jerkily:
"Thank God, Martin, you came in time. If those demons had hurt Ruth or killed Jeremy and Kermeff.. . ."
The answer was a guttural laugh from Jeremy. And in the dark Paul saw on Jeremy's breast a gleaming green cross, glittering with its own fire. He stared mutely at it, then turned and looked back toward the room they had just left, as if visualizing the same on Kermeff's kneeling body. And he knew, then, why his companions were still alive; why they were not now lying lifeless and bloodless on the floor of the downstairs chamber.
One of them—Jeremy, probably—had rushed to Allenby's dead body and seized the square of chalk in the pocket of the corpse. And the pantomime of the upper room had been reenacted in the lower room, the same way, until Martin LeGeurn and Von Heller had battered down the outside door.
The revolver shots—Martin had fired them, more than likely. Martin did not know that bullets were useless.
"Thank God," Paul muttered again. And then he was descending the stairs to the lower floor, and descending more stairs, black and creaking, to the pits.
"Which way?" Von Heller demanded harshly. "We must find the coffins."
"Coffins?" It was Jeremy frowning. "There ain't no coffins down here, sir. We looked in every single room. Besides"—viciously—"them two fiends upstairs won't never need coffins any more. When you leaped on 'em sir, and made that cross mark over their filthy hearts with the chalk, they just folded up. Shriveled away to dust, they did. Lord, what a stench! I'll never forget—"
"Never mind that. Where is the burial vault?"
"But there ain't any burial vault. We were just—"
Jeremy's words ended abruptly. He stood still, one hand gripping the lower end of the railing, the other uplifted.
"Listen to that!"
There was a sound, emanating from somewhere deep in the gloom of the cellar—a sucking, grinding sound, utterly revolting, mingled with the mumbling and gurgling of a man's voice.
"An animal, eating," Von Heller said in a whisper.
"It ain't an animal, sir."
"My God! Murgunstrumm. Well, he'll be able to show us where the coffins are."
Von Heller groped forward, eyes burning with terrible eagerness. He was a man no longer, but a hound on a hot scent which meant to him more than life and death. Crouching, he advanced noiselessly through the pits, staring straight ahead, ignoring the chambers on all sides of him as he went deeper and deeper into the maze. And the others followed right at his heels in a group.
And the sight that met the eyes of the intruders, when they reached at last the threshold of the slaughter room, soured the blood in their veins and made them rigid. The lantern flared there, on the floor against the wall. The sodden canvas sheet had been torn from its former position and lay now in an ugly gray heap on the floor.
Murgunstrumm crouched there, unaware of the eyes that watched him.
Von Heller was upon him before he knew it. With awful rage the physician hurled him back from the table. Like a madman Von Heller stood over him, hurling frightful words upon the cripple's malformed head.
And the result was electrifying. Murgunstrumm's face whipped up. His sunken eyes, now completely mad with mingled fear and venom, glared into Von Heller's writhing countenance and into the masks of the men in the doorway. Then, with a great suck of breath, Murgunstrumm stiffened.
The jangling words which spewed from his lips were not English. They were guttural, thick Serbian. And even as they echoed and re-echoed through the chamber, through the entire cellar, the cripple sprang forward.
There was no stopping him. His move was too sudden and savage. Hurling Von Heller aside, he lunged to the table, grabbed the huge knife, then was at the threshold, tearing and slashing his wa
y clear. And with a last violent scream he vanished into the outer dark.
A moment passed. No man moved. Then Von Heller seized the lantern and rushed forward.
"After him!"
"What did he say?"
"He thinks his masters betrayed him. Thinks they sent us here. He will destroy them, and I want them alive for research. After him, I say!"
Footprints led the way—footprints in the dust, twisting along the wall where other prints were not intermingled. With the lantern swaying crazily in his out-flung hand, Von Heller ran forward. Straight to the smallest of the cell-like chambers the trail led him; and when the others reached his side he was standing in the center of the stone vault, glaring hungrily at a tall, rectangular opening in the wall.
Seeing it, Paul gasped. Jeremy said hoarsely:
"We looked in here before. There wasn't no—"
"You were blind!"
And Von Heller was striding forward again, through the aperture. It was a narrow doorway; the barrier hung open, fashioned of stone, on concealed hinges. Little wonder that in the gloom Paul and Jeremy and Kermeff had not discovered it before. Every chamber had been alike then.
But not now. Now they were pacing onward through a blind tunnel. The stone walls were no longer stone, but thick boards on both sides and above and below, to hold out the earth behind them. This was not the cellar of the inn, but a cunningly contrived extension, leading into subterranean gloom.
Strange realizations came into Paul's mind. The Gray Toad had not always been an inn of death. At one time it had prospered with gaiety and life. Then the decay had come. Murgunstrumm had come here to live. And these creatures of the night had discovered the place and come here, too, and made Murgunstrumm their slave, promising him the remains of their grim feasts. They had brought their grave earth here...
For twenty yards the passage continued, penetrating deeper and deeper at a sharp incline. And then it came to an end, and the lantern light revealed a buried chamber where every sound, every shred of light, was withheld by walls of unbroken earth. A tomb, sunk deep beneath the surface of the clearing above.
And the lantern disclosed other things. Long wooden boxes lay side by side in the center of the vault. Seven of them. Seven gaunt ancient coffins.
They were open, all but one. The lids were flung back. The corpses had been hauled out savagely, madly, and hurled upon the floor. They lay there now like sodden heaps of flesh in a slaughterhouse, covered with strips and shreds of evening clothes. Great pools of blood welled beneath them. The lantern glare revealed sunken shriveled faces, hideous in decay, already beginning to disintegrate. Gaunt bones protruded from rotting flesh.
And Murgunstrumm was there. He was no longer human, but a grave robber, a resurrection man with hideous intentions, as he crouched over the lid of the last oblong box, tearing it loose. Even as the men watched him, stricken motionless by the fiendishness of it, he leaped catlike upon the enclosed body and dragged it into the open. The man was Maronaine. And there, with inarticulate cries of hate, Murgunstrumm fell upon it, driving his knife again and again into the creature's heart, laughing horribly. Then he stumbled erect, and a discordant cackle jangled from his thick lips.
"Betrayed me! Betrayed me, did yer! Turned on old Murgunstrumm, which served yet for 'most twenty eight years! Yer won't never betray no one else! I'll tear every limb of yet rotten bodies—"
He looked up then, and saw that he was not alone. His rasping voice stopped abruptly. He lurched back with uncanny quickness. His hands jerked up like claws. His convulsed face glared, masklike, between curled fingers. A screech of madness burned through his lips. For an instant he crouched there, twisting back into the wall. Then, with a cry tearing upward through his throat, he hurled himself forward.
In his madness he saw only Von Heller. Von Heller was the central object of his hate. Von Heller was the first to step forward to meet him.
It was horror, then. It was a shambles, executed in the gloom of a sunken burial vault with only the sputtering, dancing glow of the lantern to reveal it. Four men fought to overpower a mad beast gone amuck. Four lunging desperate shapes blundered about in the treacherous semi dark, clawing, slashing, striking at the horribly swift creature in their midst.
For Murgunstrumm was human no longer. Madness made a bestial mask of his features. His thick, flailing arms possessed the strength of twenty men. His heaving, leaping body was a thing of unbound fury. His eyes were wells of gleaming white, pupil-less. His drooling mouth, curled back over protruding teeth, whined and whimpered and screamed sounds which had no human significance.
He had flung the knife away in that first vicious rush. Always, as he battled, his attention was centered on Von Heller. The others did not matter. They were only objects of interference to be hurled aside. And hurl them aside he did, at last, with the sheer savagery of his attack.
For a split second, alone in the center of the chamber, he crouched with arms and head outthrust, fingers writhing. He glared straight into Von Heller's face, as the physician flattened against the wall. And then, oblivious of the revolver which came into Von Heller's hand, the cripple leaped.
Von Heller's revolver belched flame directly in his path, again and again.
In mid-air, Murgunstrumm stiffened. His twisted foot struck the edge of the open coffin before him. He tripped, lunged forward. His writhing body sprawled in a shapeless mass.
A long rattling moan welled through his parted lips. He struggled again to his knees and swayed there, shrieking. His hands flailed empty air, clawed at nothingness. And then, with a great shudder, he collapsed.
His broken body crashed across the coffin lid. His head snapped down, burying itself in Maronaine's upturned features. And then he lay quite still, staring with wide dead eyes at the ceiling.
It was Von Heller who spoke first, after many minutes of complete silence. With a last glance at the scene, the physician turned very quietly and motioned to the doorway.
"Come."
Thus, with the lantern finding the way, the four men left the cellar of horror and returned to the upstairs room where Kermeff and Ruth LeGeurn awaited them. Kermeff, standing quickly erect, said in a husky voice:
"You found them?"
"It is over," Von Heller shrugged. "Quite over. As soon as Miss LeGeurn is better, we shall leave here and return—"
"To Morrisdale?" Paul cried, seizing the man's arm.
"To Miss LeGeurn's home, where Doctor Kermeff will sign the necessary papers. Kermeff made a very natural mistake, my boy. But he will rectify it."
"I was ignorant," Kermeff muttered. "I did not know."
"There was only one way to know, to learn the truth. Paul has shown you. Now we shall leave and. . ."
But Paul was not listening. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the girl's hands. The room was sweet and clean with daylight, and he was whispering words which he wished no one but Ruth to hear.
And later, as the big car droned through sun-streaked country roads toward the distant city, Ruth LeGeurn lay in the back seat, with her head in Paul's arms, and listened to the same whispered words over again. And she smiled, for the first time in months.
The Watcher in the Green Room
The plump, stumpy man in the double-breasted gray coat was quite obviously drunk. He walked with an exaggerated shuffle which carried him perilously close to the edge of the high curbing, whereupon he stopped short, drew his fat hands from their respective pockets, and gravely regarded the drooling gutter beneath him. Proceeding sluggishly in this manner, he successfully navigated three blocks of gleaming sidewalk, turned left into Peterboro Street, and arrived before a red-brick apartment building whose square front frowned down upon him with disapproving solemnity.
He stood staring, apparently unaware that the hour was midnight and that the rain which had fallen steadily since early evening had made of him a drenched, disheveled street-walker. Before him, as he stood thus contemplating the wide entrance, the door open
ed and a man and a woman descended the stone steps. They gazed at him queerly. The man spoke.
"Drunk again, Kolitt!"
"Still," the drunken one replied, grinning.
"You'd better let Frank help you," the woman advised. "You'll be invading the wrong apartment again."
The plump man raised one hand up and out in a clumsy salute.
"A camel," he said, "never forgets."
The man and woman hesitated. In an undertone the man muttered:
"Poor devil! It's too bad. I suppose it's the easiest way to forget."
The drunken one did not hear. He grinned idiotically as the man and woman went their way, leaving him to ascend the steps alone. In the lobby he groped in the pockets of his coat and produced a key-ring. Mechanically he thrust two fingers into the brass mail-box marked ANTHONY KOLITT. Then, opening the heavy inner door with a key proportionately large, he marched down the corridor, climbed two flights of rubber-carpeted stairs, and let himself into apartment number thirty-one.
"Five days gone," he mumbled, closing the door behind him. "If they haven't found out by now, they never will."
The thought sobered him, but he was still drunk enough to fumble awkwardly for the light-switch. The bright light blinded him. Blinking, he groped down the short hall to the living-room and lowered himself heavily, coat and all, into an overstuffed chair close to the radio. Reaching out, he lit the lamp on the end-table beside him; then he stretched himself, relaxed, and gazed intently at a large gray photograph which stared at him serenely from atop the radio.
The photograph was of a woman—attractive, straight-haired, somber-eyed, perhaps thirty years of age. It stood formally in a square silver frame, bare of ornamentation or inscription. The plump man studied it without emotion, as if he had studied it precisely the same way a great many times before. Presently he rose, removed his wet garments and shoes, and walked near-naked into the adjoining room. When he returned, he held a bottle and glass in his hands. He filled the glass, raised it toward the photograph, and said quietly:
