Peter Cowles caught himself. The lights in his eyes changed suddenly. He nodded, motioned with the gun, and stepped to one side. Now Anne Fenner felt herself being shoved forward, Kathy Cowles’ supple strength pushing, propelling her toward the rocky parapet where her brother had been standing. In the sudden and awesome cavity of grey sky and utter space and the flashing memory of the rocky one-hundred-foot climb to the heights of The Caves of Hex, Anne Fenner knew what her fate was. Doom faced her, and all of it would be as innocuous and calamitous and unfortunate as an accidental fall down the battering facade of the stone monolith to the hard earth below. Her brain rioted, her nerve ends pulsed, her body twisted and tried to wrest itself from the older woman’s grasp. Her mouth tried to bite away the hand that trapped its power of speech. She tried to dig her boots into the ground, to halt the inexorable movement of her struggling body to the parapet’s edge. But it was useless. Hopeless. The woman from whom she had seemed to take Guy Warmsby’s love was merciless and seemingly incapable of weakness. Or contrition, or a change of mind or heart. Peter Cowles kept his eyes on the mouth of the cave, but a devilish smile was crookedly making the corners of his mouth work and quiver, as if he was talking to himself.
Though he might have been on the lookout for the return of Guy Warmsby—to prevent any attempts at rescue.
Anne Fenner closed her eyes.
Her soul shriveled and contracted.
Ice closed over her beating heart.
Futilely, her hands and arms beat a helpless tattoo against the savage body hurtling her toward death.
The grey sky and utter void of yawning space filled the universe. Katharine Cowles pulled her to the rim of Death, and for one long, teetering instant, both their bodies rocked and swayed in a titanic struggle for the decision between salvation and finality. Peter Cowles snarled low in his throat, wagging the gun.
“Come on—launch her—you haven’t got all day—”
Katharine Cowles summoned up one last burst of strength and heaved, thrusting outwards, putting all her weight behind the movement. Anne Fenner shot forward, arms flailing.
The sky, the earth, the space, kaleidoscoped.
She began to fall——
Preacher Podney and his acolytes had had to render Hilda Warnsdorf unconscious to take her with them. One of the Brothers, a Fallen Angel named Walters, had struck the girl over the head with a rubber truncheon, and she had dropped in the lobby of Craghold House like a young tree felled in the Spring. After that, it had all been quite simple. Quickly, wordlessly, the six men had borne her out to the rear of the hotel where a wagon without sides waited, its team of two dray horses patiently pawing the hard earth. There was a long crate in the back of the wagon. It accommodated Hilda Warnsdorf’s inert body very handily. Then the six men, in their matching garb of coats, trousers, hats, and similar beards, had all clambered aboard the wagon. Walters drove, handling the reins, and Preacher Podney sat next to him on the front seat. The most remarkable aspect of the kidnapping of Hilda Warnsdorf was the Preacher’s apparent unconcern over being seen or blocked. The attempt, carried off in broad daylight in Kragmoor country, had gone off without a hitch. It was as if Preacher Podney had had some inner knowledge that the girl would be alone in the hotel—that Carteret would be away, the Wentworth posed no problems, and that, clearly, all the guests would be off on some sort of hiking expedition somewhere. For a fact, the telephone line had been cut by the Preacher’s cult members very early that morning—which was why Wilton Maxwell, lawyer, had been unable to speak to Guy Warmsby, client, on the phone and had instructed his Miss Adams to send a Western Union wire instead. Still, it was most unusual for Preacher Podney to be so certain of everything. This kind of wisdom and boldness, as well as his belief in the sanctity of evil, was what gave the Preacher such high place in the Brotherhood of Goblin Wood. Walters and the rest of the acolytes were most impressed with the efficiency and fitness of any plan or project that Preacher Podney ever undertook.
Hilda Warnsdorf’s snatching expressed the essence of that power of darkness which had made the name Podney feared in all of Kragmoor.
He was a man to be reckoned with.
And given all possible respect and attention.
Walters drove the wagon carrying the Brotherhood and Hilda Warnsdorf slowly and carefully across the hard earth. The Shanokin Mountains stood, high and smoky, in the distance. Preacher Podney sat like a statue, hands on knees, eyes fixed on the trail.
“I look forward to tonight, Preacher,” Walters said in a voice of reverence. “It will be my first sight of such a thing.”
“Yes, Brother Walters. Tonight. You will see the glory of it all. The lamb will bleed for her God.”
Walters stirred restlessly. Then, grimly, he cleared his throat. “Preacher, I would make confession.”
“Confess, Brother. It is good for the soul.”
“I have looked with eyes of lust on this young maiden. You know, after my Mary died last year, I have been much alone. Yet now I feel no lust. I will say “Hallelujah” with the others when she receives your knife. I recognize the need for such things.”
Preacher Podney did not take his eyes off the trail.
“You have done well, Brother Walters. My soul and my spirit embrace you. You have seen the darkness and know it well.”
“Thank you, Preacher.”
“Do you think, Brother,” Preacher Podney said with a tinge of amusement, “that it was not by design that it was thyself I directed to strike the maiden down? To whom did I give the rubber weapon? Think, now, and you will know that I see all, truly.”
Walters, his eyes amazed, his expression fearful, shuddered. It was true. Then the Preacher had known all along—suspected—
“Preacher, you know all things. I stand in awe of you.”
“So be it. Drive on, Brother.”
Walters bent to his command, alternately playing the reins and shaking his head. It was true what they said about the Preacher. All of it—down to the last button on his black frock coat. The man was a wonder. A miracle. He didn’t want to think what his punishment would be had he been faint-hearted when the moment had come to wield the club and strike Hilda down as she sought to flee from the Brotherhood. Lucifer had indeed guided his hand!
Or, more surely, Preacher Podney.
The Kragmoor Wizard.
A Brother of Satan himself.
Walters said no more, busy with the reins and his own dark thoughts as the solemn, silent, gaunt figure at his side stared moodily in the direction of Goblin Wood.
Beyond them, The Caves of Hex seemed slate-grey and unreal in the imposing vastness of the sky.
The sun continued to shine down with pale amber rays.
Kragmoor country seemed so peaceful in the daylight.
Deep, deep in those caves, Guy Warmsby had penetrated far into the core of things. His eyes, aided by the revealing torchlight, had looked back into Yesterday—when goblins and demons and superstitious idols had infested the hearts of men and driven them to the perpetration of foul and unearthly acts. The further he explored, the sicker his own heart got, despite the overwhelming grandeur of artifacts and archaeological evidence that was a feast for the brain. Under any other conditions, he would have been in a perfect state of jubilation and enthusiasm. Yet, try as he might, he could not banish from his mind the very bad scene he had just played out with Peter and Katharine Cowles—as well as the anti-climactic aftermath with a young woman from Boston. He had foolishly lost his own self-control by allowing Peter’s jibes to get under his skin, and he had carelessly relaxed his guard by practically shouting to the world that he favored Anne Fenner over Kathy Cowles.
Damn all females, anyway.
Particularly those who brought with them sudden and new insights into one’s own self.
With another oath and a low growl of defeat, Guy Warmsby abandoned his solitary exploration. There was a veritable honeycomb of caves, smaller ones of course, all extending out from the main
hub of the central area he had mentioned to Peter Cowles, each of them piled with more bones and ancient instruments, such as cudgels and flails with spiked lengths of leather attached, as well as crude drinking urns and stone-hewn axes. Everything was so monumentally new and interesting and exciting, and it was with deep regret that he turned, putting his broad back to all of it. There would be time enough later, he supposed. Now, right now, he would have to go back out there and straighten out the mess with the ladies and Peter Cowles. This was no time for personal harangues, or anything that would alter his greater plan to stay on at Craghold House and continue with his studies and research work.
Bitterly, he struck back through the darkness the way he had come. The blaze of electric light in his hand was the only thing that had made such a search possible. The gloom and darkness of the caves the farther one went into them bordered on the Stygian. A real honest-to-goodness torch—a burning, tarred flambeau—really would have been more ideal, just the ticket if one really wanted to get a wider, broader look at things. The flashlight was only good for focussing on one sight at a time, and that was the truth of it. Sighing, Guy Warmsby hurried along, following the path his flashlight illuminated for him. Alone, the silence of the caves was even more ghostly and forbidding. That, too, had turned him back.
And also, perhaps, some inner sixth sense, some desperate extension of all his faculties, that had set off an alarm bell of impending danger?
He was convinced of it when he broke into the pale-grey daylight at the mouth of the cave.
And saw Peter Cowles with the gun in his hand.
And saw Katharine Cowles push Anne Fenner from the precipice of The Caves of Hex.
Anne Fenner’s pathetic, helpless figure had already shot down out of sight as a horrified Guy Warmsby raced forward.
His world had turned upside-down in a split second.
Of insanity.
Of hellishness.
Of Death.
Touches Torment
For Anne Fenner, life was sweet.
Feeling the complete emptiness of the air, the yawning vacuum of nothingness after Katharine Cowles’ cruel hands left her body and she flung downward to the ground far below, she threw out her free arms in sheer reflex, and with a maddening sense of exhilaration and drums crashing in her terrified mind, she felt those arms close over something. The fall of her plummeting figure was suddenly checked, halted, as she came to a jarring, banging, heart-stopping halt not more than four feet from the stony rim of the parapet above her. Between earth and sky, amidst great, dizzying depths of space, her body had miraculously, with the help of her own hands and arms, found a shelf of rock slanting outwards at almost a right angle to the face of the sloping rise of slabbed granite—a perch consisting of nothing more than a slab, a fault of rock jutting like a platform above the hard nothingness far below. It was this kidney-shaped stone that had prevented her from toppling freely to the base of The Caves of Hex.
Heart hammering, body aching from the force of the impact of her checked fall, Anne tried to raise her eyes upward—to see if either of her two fiendish assailants were at the rim’s edge, reveling in their horrible handiwork. But no—the rim gleamed emptily, and she could hear nothing save a low murmur of wind and another faint sound, curiously like a laugh. And then there were all the voices in the universe. She heard a blurted, explosive, angry shout—a man’s voice. It sounded like—Guy! Then there was a rapid, frenzied series of bumps and groans, of clattering rocks and thunderous exhalations of breath, as though someone had had the wind knocked out of them. Then Katharine Cowles’ shriek rent the air, and Anne Fenner painfully scrambled erect, hugging her tiny stone island of safety. If she could stand and hold on, without looking down at the dizzying earth below, she would be able to see, perhaps to climb back up to safety—but only if she were very careful.
She heard the sounds of a desperate struggle, a vicious encounter, as her fingernails raked the stone face before her and she very slowly and carefully lifted her agonized body to a standing position. Hugging the face of the bluff, as if it were life itself, she lifted her head, making herself stand more erect. In another instant she could see over the parapet’s edge, back toward the mouth of the cavern.
She saw that and more, grotesquely aware that with her back to nothing but space, her feet anchored on no more than a shelf of rock, she was still very much on the thinnest bridge between Life and Death. The scales could tip either way.
It all depended on the outcome of the fierce combat being waged directly before her—a tableau that filled her with as much amazement and disbelief as the sudden reversal of Katharine Cowles’ feelings for her and her brother Peter’s maniacal behavior.
It all depended on Guy Warmsby.
It was the sight of him, tall, angry and masterful, locked in mortal struggle with Peter Cowles all over the area at the cave’s entrance, that made Anne Fenner make a last frenzied effort to rise fully, claw at the parapet’s edge, and pull her body up and over to solid earth, where she lay gasping and strained, her eyes still on the fighting men. Katharine Cowles, huddled against the wall of the mountain of rock, did not see her come; the tall brunette’s attention was also leveled on the men struggling before her.
Peter and Guy were reeling in a grunting, fist-swinging, wrestling match of such ferocity that two wildcats could not have equalled them. Peter Cowles battered at his friend, swinging furiously, for his gun now lay discarded on the ground where a kick from Guy Warmsby’s foot had sent it clattering. Guy had very quickly attacked Cowles before he could bring the gun to bear. That was when Katharine Cowles had cried out in fear—the shriek Anne had heard. Then, within flying seconds, both men were at each other’s throats, grappling for survival. Guy Warmsby had clearly seen the insanity in Peter Cowles’ blue eyes, and the incredible venom in Kathy’s lovely face. They were like strangers to him now, people he did not know, perhaps had never known.
All his wits and strength were engaged in the fight. Peter was trying to crush him, batter him back against the mountain wall, his face livid with insensate rage. Guy was hard put to hold him off. The younger man was clawing, kicking, butting. But Guy was the taller and stronger of the two. Like a well-conditioned athlete, he had the edge, and he took advantage of it as quickly as he could, before more damage could be done. There was always the threat of the gun, which Kathy might suddenly decide to make use of.
As Peter closed in with unthinking haste, trying to overwhelm him frontally, Guy side-stepped and slammed a vicious chop with his hand across Peter’s neck. Peter gasped, choked and fell back. Guy pressed the advantage, and before Cowles could straighten up from a painful contortion, Warmsby brought his right fist upwards in a round-housing haymaker of a punch. The blow caught Peter Cowles flush on the base of his clefted chin and fairly lifted him to his toes. But the blow accomplished a lot more—a lot worse. In what seemed like a slow-motion sequence in which Anne Fenner could see what was happening but could not move to stop it, Peter Cowles flew backwards, his eyes opening in the shock of oncoming unconsciousness. Katharine Cowles couldn’t move from her frozen position at the wall. Nor could Guy Warmsby reach out and halt the dire effects of his punch. He would have been too late, anyway.
Peter Cowles’ body, dead weight hurtling backwards, gathered momentum, hitting a random boulder in its path, and seemed to bullet for the nearby edge of the parapet. In a second he was gone, vaulting into space. And then he could be seen no more. He had not been awake to scream out in horror.
Not even Katharine Cowles could scream. She slumped to the base of the wall, staring, shaking her head, her lips moving soundlessly. Guy Warmsby, dumbfounded, raced for the parapet’s rim, wildly gazing down. Anne Fenner wanted to put her hands over her ears to avoid the awful, thumping, clattering sounds of Peter Cowles’ falling body that reached her where she sat in stunned bewilderment. Everything was happening so fast, all of it, all of this madness and insane activity that had turned a joyous outing into a day of sheer h
orror. Good Lord, where had they all gone wrong? What was it about Kragmoor country that seemed to turn normal everyday decent people into savages? The light of the sky seemed to have burned out; the sun was a dying shadow arching across the sky.
In the new and more terrible quiet of that hilltop tableland of rock, Guy Warmsby stooped and picked up the fallen automatic. The ivory-plated handle twinkled briefly. Anne Fenner rose to her feet, ready to run to Katharine Cowles to comfort her. Poor Kathy. She was still staring in utter shock at the empty rim of the parapet.
“Let her alone,” Guy Warmsby said very harshly. “She’s no better than he is. I saw her push you over that same spot. It’s a miracle you’re alive—”
“Oh, Guy. There’s a ledge I fell on—but Kathy and Peter—Guy, what is all this? What happened?”
He shook his head, as baffled as she was, looking down at Katharine Cowles. There was a glazed look of pain in his own eyes. His mouth was a bitter line of resentment and almost cruel hatred.
“Look at her. The perfect lady. But she has claws, hasn’t she? Ready to scratch and kill. And dear Peter, with his jibes and his cynicism. And his utterly civilized mind. Acting like a jungle beast he was—when he was cornered—” Suddenly he pawed at his eyes, angrily. “Damn them both. They tried to kill you. I’m not sorry Peter’s dead.”
“Don’t, Guy. Please. It frightens me when you talk like that—”
Before he could answer, Katharine Cowles threw back her head and laughed. Mocking, derisive laughter. For a moment, Guy Warmsby and Anne Fenner exchanged glances, then they looked down at Katharine Cowles. Kathy was seated quietly, her back to the wall, the stupified expression gone forever. Her dark eyes were narrowed, shrewd slits capable of any crime. Any act. Any sin.
“—yes, I wanted you dead, Anne Fenner. Do you hear? You were taking Guy from me. From me and Peter. Peter was just as upset about that as I was. We know Guy too well. When he sets his mind on a woman, he has no time for anything else. Not even his archaeology. Or us. You see how it is? I have endured many of Guy’s women in the past. So did Peter. You were the last straw—for both of us. And then, of course, there was the money. Guy didn’t tell you about that, did he?”
The Craghold Legacy Page 12
