He strained his eyes, trying to make out the shapes of those who ringed him. But he glimpsed only billowing masses of shadow which heaved and writhed and squirmed with almost fluid consistency.
“Let them make good their bargain!” he exclaimed angrily.
“Then see, oh king!” cried Atla in a voice of piercing mockery.
There was a stir, a seething in the writhing shadows, and from the darkness crept, like a four-legged animal, a human shape that fell down and groveled at Bran’s feet and writhed and mowed, and lifting a death’s-head, howled like a dying dog. In the ghastly light, Bran, soul-shaken, saw the blank glassy eyes, the bloodless features, the loose, writhing, froth-covered lips of sheer lunacy–gods, was this Titus Sulla, the proud lord of life and death in Eboracum’s proud city?
Bran bared his sword.
“I had thought to give this stroke in vengeance,” he said somberly. “I give it in mercy– Vale Caesar!”
The steel flashed in the eery light and Sulla’s head rolled to the foot of the glowing altar, where it lay staring up at the shadowed sky.
“They harmed him not!” Atla’s hateful laugh slashed the sick silence. “It was what he saw and came to know that broke his brain! Like all his heavy-footed race, he knew nothing of the secrets of this ancient land. This night he has been dragged through the deepest pits of Hell, where even you might have blenched!”
“Well for the Romans that they know not the secrets of this accursed land!” Bran roared, maddened,
“with its monster-haunted meres, its foul witch-women, and its lost caverns and subterranean realms where spawn in the darkness shapes of Hell!”
“Are they more foul than a mortal who seeks their aid?” cried Atla with a shriek of fearful mirth. “Give them their Black Stone!”
A cataclysmic loathing shook Bran’s soul with red fury.
“Aye, take your cursed Stone!” he roared, snatching it from the altar and dashing it among the shadows with such savagery that bones snapped under its impact. A hurried babel of grisly tongues rose and the shadows heaved in turmoil. One segment of the mass detached itself for an instant and Bran cried out in fierce revulsion, though he caught only a fleeting glimpse of the thing, had only a brief impression of a broad strangely flattened head, pendulous writhing lips that bared curved pointed fangs, and a hideously misshapen, dwarfish body that seemed mottled–all set off by those unwinking reptilian eyes. Gods!–the myths had prepared him for horror in human aspect, horror induced by bestial visage and stunted deformity–but this was the horror of nightmare and the night.
“Go back to Hell and take your idol with you!” he yelled, brandishing his clenched fists to the skies, as the thick shadows receded, flowing back and away from him like the foul waters of some black flood.
“Your ancestors were men, though strange and monstrous–but gods, ye have become in ghastly fact what my people called ye in scorn! Worms of the earth, back into your holes and burrows! Ye foul the air and leave on the clean earth the slime of the serpents ye have become! Gonar was right–there are shapes too foul to use even against Rome!”
He sprang from the Ring as a man flees the touch of a coiling snake, and tore the stallion free. At his elbow Atla was shrieking with fearful laughter, all human attributes dropped from her like a cloak in the night.
“King of Pictland!” she cried, “King of fools! Do you blench at so small a thing? Stay and let me show you real fruits of the pits! Ha! ha! ha! Run, fool, run! But you are stained with the taint–you have called them forth and they will remember! And in their own time they will come to you again!”
He yelled a wordless curse and struck her savagely in the mouth with his open hand. She staggered, blood starting from her lips, but her fiendish laughter only rose higher.
Bran leaped into the saddle, wild for the clean heather and the cold blue hills of the north where he could plunge his sword into clean slaughter and his sickened soul into the red maelstrom of battle, and forget the horror which lurked below the fens of the west. He gave the frantic stallion the rein, and rode through the night like a hunted ghost, until the hellish laughter of the howling were-woman died out in the darkness behind.
The Symbol
Eons before Atlantean days in the time of the world’s black dawn, Strange were the kings and grim the deeds that the pallid moon looked on.
When the great black cities split the stars and strange prows broke the tide, And smoke went up from ghastly shrines where writhing victims died.
Black magic raised its serpent head, and all things foul and banned, Till an angry God hurled up the sea against the shuddering land.
And the grisly kings they read their doom in the wind and the rising brine, And they set a pillar on a hill for a symbol and a sign.
Black shrine and hall and carven wall sank to eternal sleep,
And dawn looked down on a silent world and the blue unbroken deep.
Now men go forth in their daily ways and they reck not of the feel Of the veil that crushed, so long ago, the world beneath its heel.
But deep in the seaweed-haunted halls in the green unlighted deep, Inhuman kings await the day that shall break their chains of sleep.
And far in a grim untrodden land on a jungle-girded hill,
A pillar stands like a sign of Fate, in subtle warning still.
Carved in its blind black face of stone a fearful unknown rune Leers in the glare of the tropic sun and the cold of the leprous moon.
And it shall stand for a symbol mute that men are weak and blind, Till Hell roars up from the black abyss and horror swoops behind.
For this is the screed upon the shaft, oh, pallid sons of men:
“We that were lords of all the earth, shall rise and rule again.”
And dark is the doom of the tribes of earth, that hour wild and red, When the ages give their secrets up and the sea gives up its dead.
The Valley of the Lost
As a wolf spies upon its hunters, John Reynolds watched his pursuers. He lay close in a thicket on the slope, a red inferno of hate seething in his heart. He had ridden hard; up the slope behind him, where the dim path wound up out of Lost Valley, his crank-eyed mustang stood, head drooping, trembling, after the long run. Below him, not more than eighty yards away, stood his enemies, fresh come from the slaughter of his kinsmen.
In the clearing fronting Ghost Cave they had dismounted and were arguing among themselves. John Reynolds knew them all with an old, bitter hate. The black shadow of feud lay between them and himself.
The feuds of early Texas have been neglected by chroniclers who have sung the feuds of the Kentucky mountains, yet the men who first settled the Southwest were of the same breed as those mountaineers.
But there was a difference; in the mountain country feuds dragged on for generations; on the Texas frontier they were short, fierce and appallingly bloody.
The Reynolds-McCrill feud was long, as Texas feuds went–fifteen years had passed since old Esau Reynolds stabbed young Braxton McCrill to death with his bowie knife in the saloon at Antelope Wells, in a quarrel over range rights. For fifteen years the Reynoldses and their kin, the Brills, Allisons and Donnellys, had been at open war with the McCrills and their kin, the Killihers, the Fletchers and the Ords. There had been ambushes in the hills, murders on the open range, and gun-fights on the streets of the little cow-towns. Each clan had rustled the other’s cattle wholesale. Gunmen and outlaws called in by both sides to participate for pay had spread a reign of terror and lawlessness throughout the vicinity.
Settlers shunned the war-torn range; the feud was become a red obstacle in the way of progress and development–a savage retrogression which was demoralizing the whole countryside.
Little John Reynolds cared. He had grown up in the atmosphere of the feud, and it had become a burning obsession with him. The war had taken fearful toll on both clans, but the Reynoldses had suffered most.
He was the last of the fighting Reynoldses, for old Esau, the grim old pat
riarch who ruled the clan, would never again walk or sit in a saddle, with his legs paralyzed by McCrill bullets. John had seen his brothers shot down from ambush or killed in pitched battles.
Now the last stroke had well-nigh wiped out the waning clan. John Reynolds cursed as he thought of the trap into which they had walked in the saloon at Antelope Wells, where without warning their hidden foes had opened their murderous fire. There had fallen his cousin, Bill Donnelly; his sister’s son, young Jonathon Brill; his brother-in-law, Job Allison; and Steve Kerney, the hired gunman. How he himself had shot his way through and gained the hitching-rack, untouched by that blasting hail of lead, John Reynolds hardly knew. But they had pressed him so closely he had not had time to mount his long-limbed rangy bay, but had been forced to take the first horse he came to–the crank-eyed, speedy, but short-winded mustang of the dead Jonathon Brill.
He had distanced his pursuers for a while–had gained the uninhabited hills and swung back into mysterious Lost Valley, with its silent thickets and crumbling stone columns, seeking to double back over the hills and gain the country of the Reynoldses. But the mustang had failed him. He had tied it up the slope, out of sight of the valley floor, and crept back, to see his enemies ride into the valley. There were five of them–old Jonas McCrill, with the perpetual snarl twisting his wolfish lips; Saul Fletcher, with his black beard and the limping, dragging gait that a fall in his youth from a wild mustang had left him; Bill Ord and Peter Ord, brothers; the outlaw Jack Solomon.
Jonas McCrill’s voice came up to the silent watcher: “And I tell yuh he’s a-hidin’ somewhere in this valley. He was a-ridin’ that mustang and it didn’t never have no guts. I’m bettin’ it give plumb out on him time he got this far.”
“Well”–it was the hated voice of Saul Fletcher–“what’re we a-standin’ ’round pow-wowin’ for? Why don’t we start huntin’ him?”
“Not so fast,” growled old Jonas. “Remember it’s John Reynolds we’re achasin’. We got plenty time–”
John Reynolds’ fingers hardened on the stock of his single-action .45. There were two cartridges unfired in the cylinder. He pushed the muzzle through the stems of the thicket in front of him, his thumb drawing back the wicked fanged hammer. His grey eyes narrowed and became opaque as ice as he sighted down the long blue barrel. An instant he weighed his hatred, and chose Saul Fletcher. All the hate in his soul centered for an instant on that brutal black-bearded face, and the limping tread he had heard a night he lay wounded in a besieged corral with his brother’s riddled corpse beside him, and fought off Saul and his brothers.
John Reynolds’ finger crooked and the crash of the shot broke the echoes in the sleeping hills. Saul Fletcher swayed back, flinging his black beard drunkenly upward, and crashed face-down and headlong.
The others, with the quickness of men accustomed to frontier warfare, dropped behind rocks, and their answering shots roared back as they combed the slope blindly. The bullets tore through the thickets, whistling over the unseen killer’s head. High up on the slope the mustang, out of the sight of the men in the valley but frightened by the noise, screamed shrilly and, rearing, snapped the reins that held him and fled away up the hill path. The drum of his hoofs on the stones dwindled in the distance.
Silence reigned for an instant, then Jonas McCrill’s wrathful voice: “I told yuh he was a-hidin’ here!
Come outa there–he’s got clean away.”
The old fighter’s rangy frame rose up from behind the rock where he had taken refuge. Reynolds, grinning fiercely, took steady aim, then some instinct of self-preservation held his hand. The others came out into the open.
“What are we a-waitin’ on?” yelled young Bill Ord, tears of rage in his eyes. “Here that coyote’s done shot Saul and’s ridin’ hell-for-leather away from here, and we’re a-standin’ ’round jawin’. I’m a-goin’
to–” He started for his horse.
“Yuh’re a-goin’ to listen to me!” roared old Jonas. “I warned yuh-all to go slow–but yuh would come lickety-split along like a bunch of blind buzzards, and now Saul’s layin’ there dead. lf we ain’t careful John Reynolds’ll kill all of us. Did I tell yuh-all he was here? Likely stopped to rest his horse. He can’t go far. This here’s a long hunt, like I told yuh at first. Let him get a good start. Long as he’s ahead of us, we got to watch out for ambushes. He’ll try to git back onto the Reynolds range. Well, we’re a-goin’ after him slow and easy and keep him hazed back all the time. We’ll be a-ridin’ the inside of a big half-circle and he can’t get by us–not on that short-winded mustang. We’ll just foller him and gather him in when his horse can’t do no more. And I purty well know where he’ll come to bay at–Blind Horse Canyon.”
“We’ll have to starve him out, then,” growled Jack Solomon.
“No, we won’t,” grinned old Jonas. “Bill, yuh high-tail it back to Antelope and git five or six sticks of dynamite. Then you git a fresh horse and follow our trail. If we catch him before he gits to the canyon, all right. If he beats us there and holes up, we’ll wait for yuh, and then blast him out.”
“What about Saul?” growled Peter Ord.
“He’s dead,” grunted Jonas. “Nothin’ we can do for him now. No time to take him back.” He glanced up at the sky, where already black dots wheeled against the blue. His gaze drifted to the walled-up mouth of the cavern in the steep cliff which rose at right angles to the slope up which the path wandered.
“We’ll break open that cave and put him in it,” he said. “We’ll pile up the rocks again and the wolves and buzzards can’t git to him. May be several days before we git back.”
“That cave’s ha’nted,” uneasily muttered Bill Ord. “The Injuns always said if yuh put a dead man in there, he’d come a-walkin’ out at midnight.”
“Shet up and help pick up pore Saul,” snapped Jonas. “Here’s your own kin a-layin’ dead, and his murderer a-ridin’ further away every second, and you talk about ha’nts.”
As they lifted the corpse, Jonas drew the long-barreled six-shooter from the holster and shoved the weapon into his own waist-band.
“Pore Saul,” he grunted. “He’s shore dead. Shot plumb through the heart. Dead before he hit the ground, I reckon. Well, we’ll make them damned Reynoldses pay for it.”
They carried the dead man to the cave and, laying him down, attacked the rocks which blocked the entrance. These were soon torn aside, and Reynolds saw the men carry the body inside. They emerged almost immediately, minus their burden, and mounted their horses. Young Bill Ord swung away down the valley and vanished among the trees, and the rest cantered up the winding trail that led up into the hills.
They passed within a hundred feet of his refuge and John Reynolds hugged the earth, fearing discovery.
But they did not glance in his direction. He heard the dwindling of their hoofs over the rocky path, then silence settled again over the ancient valley.
John Reynolds rose cautiously, looked about him as a hunted wolf looks, then made his way quickly down the slope. He had a very definite purpose in mind. A single unfired cartridge was all his ammunition; but about the dead body of Saul Fletcher was a belt well filled with .45 calibre cartridges.
As he attacked the rocks heaped in the cave’s mouth, there hovered in his mind the curious dim speculations which the cave and the valley itself always roused in him. Why had the Indians named it the Valley of the Lost, which white men shortened to Lost Valley? Why had the red men shunned it? Once in the memory of white men, a band of Kiowas, fleeing the vengeance of Bigfoot Wallace and his rangers, had taken up their abode there and fallen on evil times. The survivors of the tribe had fled, telling wild tales in which murder, fratricide, insanity, vampirism, slaughter and cannibalism had played grim parts.
Then six white men, brothers, Stark by name, had settled in Lost Valley. They had reopened the cave which the Kiowas had blocked up. Horror had fallen on them and in one night five died by one anothers’
hands. The survivor h
ad walled up the cave mouth again and departed, where none knew, though word had drifted through the settlements of a man named Stark who had come among the remnants of those Kiowas who had once lived in Lost Valley and, after a long talk with them, had cut his own throat with his bowie knife.
What was the mystery of Lost Valley, if not a web of lies and legends? What the meaning of those crumbling stones which, scattered all over the valley, half hidden in the climbing growth, bore a curious symmetry, especially in the moonlight, so that some people believed when the Indians swore they were the half-destroyed columns of a prehistoric city which once stood in Lost Valley? Reynolds himself had seen, before it crumbled into a heap of grey dust, a skull unearthed at the base of a cliff by a wandering prospector, which seemed neither Caucasian nor Indian–a curious, peaked skull, which but for the formation of the jaw-bones might have been that of some unknown antediluvian animal.
Such thoughts flitted vaguely and momentarily through John Reynolds’ mind as he dislodged the boulders, which the McCrills had put back loosely, just firmly enough to keep a wolf or buzzard from squeezing through. In the main his thoughts were engrossed with the cartridges in dead Saul Fletcher’s belt. A fighting chance! A lease on life! He would fight his way out of the hills yet–would gather the remnants of his clan and strike back. He would bring in more gunmen and cutthroats to reinforce the thinning ranks.
He would flood the whole range with blood and bring the countryside to ruin, if by those means he might be avenged. For years he had been the moving factor in the feud. When even old Esau had weakened and wished for peace, John Reynolds had kept the flame of hate blazing. The feud had become his one driving motive–his one interest in life and reason for existence. The last boulders fell aside.
John Reynolds stepped into the semi-gloom of the cavern. It was not large but the shadows seemed to cluster there in almost tangible substance. Slowly his eyes accustomed themselves; an involuntary exclamation broke from his lips–the cave was empty! He swore in bewilderment. He had seen men carry Saul Fletcher’s corpse into the cave and come out again, empty handed. Yet no corpse lay on the dusty cavern floor. He went to the back of the cave, glanced at the straight, even wall, bent and examined the smooth rock floor. His keen eyes, straining in the gloom, made out a dull smear of blood on the stone. It ended abruptly at the back wall, and there was no stain on the wall.
The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard Page 35
