They found Sir Michael badly wounded and Dermod O’Connor dying with a cleft shoulder bone and a ghastly wound in his breast. But such was their fury and hatred, that they flung a noose about the dying robber’s neck and hanged him to a great tree on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea.
“And,” said my friend the shepherd, stirring the fire, “the peasant folk still point out the tree and call it Dermod’s Bane, after the Danish manner, and men have seen the great outlaw o’ nights, and him gnashing his great tushes and spouting blood from shoulder and breast and swearin’ all manner o’ ill on the Kirowans and their blood for all time to come.
“And so, sir, let you not walk in the cliffs over the sea by night for you are of the blood he hates and the same name of the man who felled him is on you. For let you laugh if so be your will, but the ghost of Dermod O’Connor the Wolf is abroad o’ dark night and the moon out of the sky, and him with his great black beard and ghastly eyes and boar tushes.”
They pointed me out the tree, Dermod’s Bane, and strangely like a gallows it looked, standing there as it had stood for how many hundred years I do not know, for men live long in Ireland and trees live longer.
There were no other trees near and the cliff rose sheer from the sea for four hundred feet. Below was only the deep sinister blue of the waves, deep and dark, breaking on the cruel rocks.
I walked much in the hills at night for when the silence of the darkness was on the world and no speech or noises of men to hold my thoughts, my sorrow was dark on my heart again and I walked on the hills where the stars seemed close and warm. And often my mazed brain wondered which star she was on, or if she had turned to a star.
One night the old, sharp agony returned unbearably. I rose from my bed–for I was staying at the time in a little mountain inn–and dressed and went into the hills. My temples throbbed and there was an unbearable weight about my heart. My dumb frozen soul shrieked up to God but I could not weep. I felt I must weep or go mad. For never a tear had passed my eyelids since–
Well, I walked on and on, how long or how far I do not know. The stars were hot and red and angry and gave me no comfort that night. At first I wanted to scream and howl and throw myself on the ground and tear the grass with my teeth. Then that passed and I wandered as in a trance. There was no moon and in the dim starlight the hills and their trees loomed dark and strange. Over the summits I could see the great Atlantic lying like a dusky silver monster and I heard her faint roaring.
Something flitted in front of me and I thought that it was a wolf. But there have been no wolves in Ireland for many and many a year. Again I saw the thing, a long low shadowy shape. I followed it mechanically.
Now in front of me I saw a cliff overlooking the sea. On the cliff ’s edge was a single great tree that loomed up like a gibbet. I approached this.
Then in front of me, as I neared the tree, a vague mist hovered. A strange fear spread over me as I watched stupidly. A form became evident. Dim and silky, like a shred of moon-mist, but with an undoubted human shape. A face–I cried out!
A vague, sweet face floated before me, indistinct, mist-like–yet I made out the shimmery mass of dark hair, the high pure forehead, the red curving lips–the serious soft grey eyes–
“Moira!” I cried in agony and rushed forward, my aching arms spread wide, my heart bursting in my bosom.
She floated away from me like a mist blown by a breeze; now she seemed to waver in space–I felt myself staggering wildly on the very edge of the cliff, whither my blind rush had led me. As a man wakes from a dream I saw in one flashing instant the cruel rocks four hundred feet below, I heard the hungry lapping of the waves–as I felt myself falling forward I saw the vision, but now it was changed hideously.
Great tusk-like teeth gleamed ghoulishly through a matted black beard. Terrible eyes blazed under penthouse brows; blood flowed from a wound in the shoulder and a ghastly gash in the broad breast–
“Dermod O’Connor!” I screamed, my hair bristling. “Avaunt, fiend out of Hell–”
I swayed out for the fall I could not check, with death waiting four hundred feet below. Then a soft small hand closed on my wrist and I was drawn irresistibly back. I fell, but back on the soft green grass at the lip of the cliff, not to the keen-edged rocks and waiting sea below. Oh, I knew–I could not be wrong.
The small hand was gone from my wrist, the hideous face gone from the cliff edge–but that grasp on my wrist that drew me back from my doom–how could I fail to recognize it? A thousand times had I felt the dear touch of that soft hand on my arm or in my own hand. Oh Moira, Moira, pulse of my heart, in life and in death you were ever at my side.
And now for the first time I wept and lying on my face with my face in my hands, I poured my racked heart out in scalding, blinding and soul-easing tears, until the sun came up over the blue Galway hills and limned the branches of Dermod’s Bane with a strange new radiance.
Now, did I dream or was I mad? Did, in truth, the ghost of that long-dead outlaw lead me across the hills to the cliff under the death-tree, and there assume the shape of my dead sister to lure me to my doom?
And did in truth the real hand of that dead sister, brought suddenly to my side by my peril, hold me back from death?
Believe or disbelieve as you will. To me it is a fact. I saw Dermod O’Connor that night and he led me over the cliff; and the soft hand of Moira Kirowan dragged me back and its touch loosened the frozen channels of my heart and brought me peace. For the wall that bars the living from the dead is but a thin veil, I know now, and so sure as a dead woman’s love conquered a dead man’s hate, so sure shall I some day in the world beyond, hold my sister in my arms again.
The Hills of the Dead
I
VOODOO
The twigs which N’Longa flung on the fire broke and crackled. The upleaping flames lighted the countenances of the two men. N’Longa, voodoo man of the Slave Coast, was very old. His wizened and gnarled frame was stooped and brittle, his face creased by hundreds of wrinkles. The red firelight glinted on the human finger-bones which composed his necklace.
The other was a white man and his name was Solomon Kane. He was tall and broad-shouldered, clad in black close garments, the garb of the Puritan. His featherless slouch hat was drawn low over his heavy brows, shadowing his darkly pallid face. His cold deep eyes brooded in the firelight.
“You come again, brother,” droned the fetish-man, speaking in the jargon which passed for a common language of black man and white on the West Coast. “Many moons burn and die since we make blood-palaver. You go to the setting sun, but you come back!”
“Aye.” Kane’s voice was deep and almost ghostly. “Yours is a grim land, N’Longa, a red land barred with the black darkness of horror and the bloody shadows of death. Yet I have returned–”
N’Longa stirred the fire, saying nothing, and after a pause Kane continued.
“Yonder in the unknown vastness”–his long finger stabbed at the black silent jungle which brooded beyond the firelight–“yonder lie mystery and adventure and nameless terror. Once I dared the jungle–once she nearly claimed my bones. Something entered into my blood, something stole into my soul like a whisper of unnamed sin. The jungle! Dark and brooding–over leagues of the blue salt sea she has drawn me and with the dawn I go to seek the heart of her. Mayhap I shall find curious adventure–mayhap my doom awaits me. But better death than the ceaseless and everlasting urge, the fire that has burned my veins with bitter longing.”
“She call,” muttered N’Longa. “At night she coil like serpent about my hut and whisper strange things to me. Ai ya! The jungle call. We be blood-brothers, you and I. Me, N’Longa, mighty worker of nameless magic. You go to the jungle as all men go who hear her call. Maybe you live, more like you die. You believe in my fetish work?”
“I understand it not,” said Kane grimly, “but I have seen you send your soul forth from your body to animate a lifeless corpse.”
“Aye! Me N’Longa,
priest of the Black God! Now watch, I make magic.”
Kane gazed at the black man who bent over the fire, making even motions with his hands and mumbling incantations. Kane watched and he seemed to grow sleepy. A mist wavered in front of him, through which he saw dimly the form of N’Longa, etched black against the flames. Then all faded out.
Kane awoke with a start, hand shooting to the pistol in his belt. N’Longa grinned at him across the flame and there was a scent of early dawn in the air. The fetish-man held a long stave of curious black wood in his hands. This stave was carved in a strange manner, and one end tapered to a sharp point.
“This voodoo staff,” said N’Longa, putting it in the Englishman’s hand. “Where your guns and long knife fail, this save you. When you want me, lay this on your breast, fold your hands on it and sleep. I come to you in your dreams.”
Kane weighed the thing in his hand, highly suspicious of witchcraft. It was not heavy, but seemed hard as iron. A good weapon at least, he decided. Dawn was just beginning to steal over the jungle and the river.
II
RED EYES
Solomon Kane shifted his musket from his shoulder and let the stock fall to the earth. Silence lay about him like a fog. Kane’s lined face and tattered garments showed the effect of long bush travel. He looked about him.
Some distance behind him loomed the green, rank jungle, thinning out to low shrubs, stunted trees and tall grass. Some distance in front of him rose the first of a chain of bare, somber hills, littered with boulders, shimmering in the merciless heat of the sun. Between the hills and the jungle lay a broad expanse of rough, uneven grasslands, dotted here and there by clumps of thorn-trees.
An utter silence hung over the country. The only sign of life was a few vultures flapping heavily across the distant hills. For the last few days Kane had noticed the increasing number of these unsavory birds. The sun was rocking westward but its heat was in no way abated.
Trailing his musket he started forward slowly. He had no objective in view. This was all unknown country and one direction was as good as another. Many weeks ago he had plunged into the jungle with the assurance born of courage and ignorance. Having by some miracle survived the first few weeks, he was becoming hard and toughened, able to hold his own with any of the grim denizens of the fastness he dared.
As he progressed he noted an occasional lion spoor but there seemed to be no animals in the grasslands–none that left tracks, at any rate. Vultures sat like black, brooding images in some of the stunted trees, and suddenly he saw an activity among them some distance beyond. Several of the dusky birds circled about a clump of high grass, dipping, then rising again. Some beast of prey was defending his kill against them, Kane decided, and wondered at the lack of snarling and roaring which usually accompanied such scenes. His curiosity was roused and he turned his steps in that direction.
At last, pushing through the grass which rose about his shoulders, he saw, as through a corridor walled with the rank waving blades, a ghastly sight. The corpse of a black man lay, face down, and as the Englishman looked, a great dark snake rose and slid away into the grass, moving so quickly that Kane was unable to decide its nature. But it had a weird human-like suggestion about it.
Kane stood over the body, noting that while the limbs lay awry as if broken, the flesh was not torn as a lion or leopard would have torn it. He glanced up at the whirling vultures and was amazed to see several of them skimming along close to the earth, following a waving of the grass which marked the flight of the thing which had presumably slain the black man. Kane wondered what thing the carrion birds, which eat only the dead, were hunting through the grasslands. But Africa is full of never-explained mysteries.
Kane shrugged his shoulders and lifted his musket again. Adventures he had had in plenty since he parted from N’Longa some moons agone, but still that nameless paranoid urge had driven him on and on, deeper and deeper into those trackless ways. Kane could not have analyzed this call; he would have attributed it to Satan, who lures men to their destruction. But it was but the restless turbulent spirit of the adventurer, the wanderer–the same urge which sends the gipsy caravans about the world, which drove the Viking galleys over unknown seas and which guides the flights of the wild geese.
Kane sighed. Here in this barren land seemed neither food nor water, but he had wearied unto death of the dank, rank venom of the thick jungle. Even a wilderness of bare hills was preferable, for a time at least. He glanced at them, where they lay brooding in the sun, and started forward again.
He held N’Longa’s fetish stave in his left hand, and though his conscience still troubled him for keeping a thing so apparently diabolic in nature, he had never been able to bring himself to throw it away.
Now as he went toward the hills, a sudden commotion broke out in the tall grass in front of him, which was, in places, taller than a man. A thin, high-pitched scream sounded and on its heels an earth-shaking roar. The grass parted and a slim figure came flying toward him like a wisp of straw blown on the wind–a brown-skinned girl, clad only in a skirt-like garment. Behind her, some yards away but gaining swiftly, came a huge lion.
The girl fell at Kane’s feet with a wail and a sob, and lay clutching at his ankles. The Englishman dropped the voodoo stave, raised his musket to his shoulder and sighted coolly at the ferocious feline face which neared him every instant. Crash! The girl screamed once and slumped on her face. The huge cat leaped high and wildly, to fall and lie motionless.
Kane reloaded hastily before he spared a glance at the form at his feet. The girl lay as still as the lion he had just slain, but a quick examination showed that she had only fainted.
He bathed her face with water from his canteen and presently she opened her eyes and sat up. Fear flooded her face as she looked at her rescuer and she made to rise.
Kane held out a restraining hand and she cowered down, trembling. The roar of his heavy musket was enough to frighten any native who had never before seen a white man, Kane reflected.
The girl was a much higher type than the thick-lipped, bestial West Coast negroes to whom Kane had been used. She was slim and finely formed, of a deep brown hue rather than ebony; her nose was straight and thin-bridged, her lips were not too thick. Somewhere in her blood there was a strong Berber strain.
Kane spoke to her in a river dialect, a simple language he had learned during his wandering, and she replied haltingly. The inland tribes traded slaves and ivory to the river people and were familiar with their jargon.
“My village is there,” she answered Kane’s question, pointing to the southern jungle with a slim, rounded arm. “My name is Zunna. My mother whipped me for breaking a cooking-kettle and I ran away because I was angry. I am afraid; let me go back to my mother!”
“You may go,” said Kane, “but I will take you, child. Suppose another lion came along? You were very foolish to run away.”
She whimpered a little. “Are you not a god?”
“No, Zunna. I am only a man, though the color of my skin is not as yours. Lead me now to your village.”
She rose hesitantly, eyeing him apprehensively through the wild tangle of her hair. To Kane she seemed like some frightened young animal. She led the way and Kane followed. She indicated that her village lay to the southeast, and their route brought them nearer to the hills. The sun began to sink and the roaring of lions reverberated over the grasslands. Kane glanced at the western sky; this open country was no place in which to be caught by night. He glanced toward the hills and saw that they were within a few hundred yards of the nearest. He saw what seemed to be a cave.
“Zunna,” said he haltingly, “we can never reach your village before nightfall and if we bide here the lions will take us. Yonder is a cavern where we may spend the night–”
She shrank and trembled.
“Not in the hills, master!” she whimpered. “Better the lions!”
“Nonsense!” His tone was impatient; he had had enough of native superstition. “We will
spend the night in yonder cave.”
She argued no further, but followed him. They went up a short slope and stood at the mouth of the cavern, a small affair, with sides of solid rock and a floor of deep sand.
“Gather some dry grass, Zunna,” commanded Kane, standing his musket against the wall at the mouth of the cave, “but go not far away, and listen for lions. I will build here a fire which shall keep us safe from beasts tonight. Bring some grass and any twigs you may find, like a good child, and we will sup. I have dried meat in my pouch and water also.”
She gave him a strange, long glance, then turned away without a word. Kane tore up grass near at hand, noting how it was seared and crisp from the sun, and heaping it up, struck flint and steel. Flame leaped up and devoured the heap in an instant. He was wondering how he could gather enough grass to keep a fire going all night, when he was aware that he had visitors.
Kane was used to grotesque sights, but at first glance he started and a slight coldness traveled down his spine. Two black men stood before him in silence. They were tall and gaunt and entirely naked. Their skins were a dusty black, tinged with a gray, ashy hue, as of death. Their faces were different from any negroes he had seen. The brows were high and narrow, the noses huge and snout-like; the eyes were inhumanly large and inhumanly red. As the two stood there it seemed to Kane that only their burning eyes lived.
He spoke to them, but they did not answer. He invited them to eat with a motion of his hand, and they silently squatted down near the cave mouth, as far from the dying embers of the fire as they could get.
Kane turned to his pouch and began taking out the strips of dried meat which he carried. Once he glanced at his silent guests; it seemed to him that they were watching the glowing ashes of his fire, rather than him.
The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard Page 15
