Out of the Dark

by Robert W. Chambers

  Let the gold gods save or slay

  Scented lilies bloom in May.

  Boom, boom, temple gong!

  Ding-dong!

  Ding-dong!’

  ‘What are you singing?’ whispered Cleves.

  ‘“The Bells of Yian”.’

  ‘Is it old?’

  ‘Of the thirteenth century. There were few Buddhist bells in Yian then. It is Lamaism that has destroyed the Mongols and that has permitted the creed of the Assassins to spread – the devil worship of Erlik.’

  He looked at her, not understanding. And she, pale, slim prophetess, in the moonlight, gazed at him out of lost eyes – eyes which saw, perhaps, the bloody age of men when mankind took the devil by the throat and all Mount Alamout went up in smoking ruin; and the Eight Towers were dark as death and as silent before the blast of the silver clarions of Ghenghis Khan.

  ‘Something is stirring in the forest,’ whispered Tressa, her fingers on her lips.

  ‘Damnation,’ muttered Recklow, ‘it’s the wind!’

  They listened. Far in the forest they heard the clatter of palm-fronds. They waited. The ominous warning grew faint, then rose again – a long, low rattle of palm-fronds which became a steady monotone.

  ‘We hunt,’ said Recklow bluntly. ‘Come on!’

  But the girl sprang from the hammock and caught her husband’s arm and drew Recklow back from the hibiscus hedge.

  ‘Use me,’ she said. ‘You could never find the Yezidee. Let me do the hunting; and then shoot very, very fast.’

  ‘We’ve got to take her,’ said Recklow. ‘We dare not leave her.’

  ‘I can’t let her lead the way into those black woods,’ muttered Cleves.

  ‘The wind is blowing in my face,’ insisted Recklow. ‘We’d better hurry.’

  Tressa laid one hand on her husband’s arm.

  ‘I can find the Yezidee, I think. You never could find him before he finds you! Victor, let me use my own knowledge! Let me find the way. Please let me lead! Please, Victor. Because, if you don’t, I’m afraid we’ll all die here in the garden where we stand.’

  Cleves cast a haggard glance at Recklow, then looked at his wife.

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  The girl opened the hedge gate. Both men followed with pistols lifted.

  The moon silvered the forest. There was no mist, but a night-wind blew mournfully through palm and cypress, carrying with it the strange, disturbing pungency of the jungle – wild, unfamiliar perfumes – the acrid aroma of swamp and rotting mould.

  ‘What about snakes?’ muttered Recklow, knee deep in wild phlox.

  But there was a deadlier snake to find and destroy, somewhere in the blotched shadows of the forest.

  The first sentinel trees were very near, now; and Tressa was running across a ghostly tangle, where once had been an orange grove, and where aged and dying citrus stumps rose stark amid the riot of encroaching jungle.

  ‘She’s circling to get the wind at our backs,’ breathed Recklow, running forward beside Cleves. ‘That’s our only chance to kill the dirty rat – catch him with the wind at our backs!’

  Once, traversing a dry hammock where streaks of moonlight alternated with velvet-black shadow a rattlesnake sprang his goblin alarm.

  They could not locate the reptile. They shrank together and moved warily, chilled with fear.

  Once, too, clear in the moonlight, the Grey Death reared up from bloated folds and stood swaying rhythmically in a horrible shadow dance before them. And Cleves threw one arm around his wife and crept past, giving death a wide berth there in the checkered moonlight.

  Now, under foot, the dry hammock lay everywhere and the night wind blew on their backs.

  Then Tressa turned and halted the two men with a gesture. And went to her husband where he stood in the palm forest, and laid her hands on his shoulders, looking him very wistfully in the eyes.

  Under her searching gaze he seemed oddly to comprehend her appeal.

  ‘You are going to use – to use your knowledge,’ he said mechanically. ‘You are going to find the man in white.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are going to find him in a way we don’t understand,’ he continued, dully.

  ‘Yes … You will not hold me in – in horror – will you?’

  Recklow came up, making no sound on the spongy palm litter underfoot.

  ‘Can you find this devil?’ he whispered.

  ‘I – think so.’

  ‘Does your super-instinct – finer sense – knowledge – whatever it is – give you any inkling as to his whereabouts, Mrs Cleves?’

  ‘I think he is here in this hammock. Only—’ she turned again, with swift impulse, to her husband, ‘—only if you – if you do not hold me in – in horror – because of what I do—’

  There was a silence; then:

  ‘What are you about to do?’ he asked hoarsely.

  ‘Slay this man.’

  ‘We’ll do that,’ said Cleves with a shudder. ‘Only show him to us and we’ll shoot the dirty reptile to slivers—’

  ‘Suppose we hit the jar of gas,’ said Recklow.

  After a silence, Tressa said:

  ‘I have got to give him back to Satan. There is no other way. I understood that from the first. He can not die by your pistols, though you shoot very fast and straight. No!’

  After another silence, Recklow said:

  ‘You had better find him before the wind changes. We hunt down wind or – we die here together.’

  She looked at her husband.

  ‘Show him to us in your own way,’ he said, ‘and deal with him as he must be dealt with.’

  A gleam passed across her pale face and she tried to smile at her husband.

  Then, turning down the hammock to the east, she walked noiselessly forward over the fibrous litter, the men on either side of her, their pistols poised.

  They had halted on the edge of an open glade, ringed with young pines in fullest plumage.

  Tressa was standing very straight and still in a strange, supple, agonised attitude, her left forearm across her eyes, her right hand clenched, her slender body slightly twisted to the left.

  The men gazed pallidly at her with tense, set faces, knowing that the girl was in terrible mental conflict against another mind – a powerful, sinister mind which was seeking to grasp her thoughts and control them.

  Minute after minute sped: the girl never moved, locked in her psychic duel with this other brutal mind – beating back its terrible thought-waves which were attacking her, fighting for mental supremacy, struggling in silence with an unseen adversary whose mental dominance meant death.

  Suddenly her cry rang out sharply in the moonlight, and then, all at once, a man in white stood there in the lustre of the moon – a young, graceful man dressed in white flannels and carrying on his right arm what seemed to be a long white cloak.

  Instantly the girl was transformed from a living statue into a lithe, supple, lightly moving thing that passed swiftly to the west of the glade, keeping the young man in white facing the wind, which was blowing and tossing the plumy young pines.

  ‘So it is you, young man, with whom I have been wrestling here under the moon of the only God!’ she said in a strange little voice, all vibrant and metallic with menacing laughter.

  ‘It is I, Keuke Mongol,’ replied the young man in white, tranquilly; yet his words came as though he were tired and out of breath, and the hand he raised to touch his small black moustache trembled as if from physical exhaustion.

  ‘Yarghouz!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why did I not know you there on the golf links, Assassin of the Seventh Tower? And why do you come here with your shroud over your arm and hidden under it, in your right hand, a flask full of death?’

  He said, smiling:

  ‘I come because you are to die, Heavenly-Azure Eyes. I bring you your shroud.’ And he moved warily westward around the open circle of young pines.

  Instantly the girl flung her right arm straigh
t upward.

  ‘Yarghouz!’

  ‘I hear thee, Heavenly Azure.’

  ‘Another step to the west and I shatter thy flask of gas.’

  ‘With what?’ he demanded; but stood discreetly motionless.

  ‘With what I grasp in an empty palm. Thou knowest, Yarghouz.’

  ‘I have heard,’ he said with smiling uncertainty, ‘but to hear of force that can be hurled out of an empty palm is one thing, and to see it and feel it is another. I think you lie, Heavenly Azure.’

  ‘So thought Gutchlug. And died of a yellow snake.’

  The young man seemed to reflect. Then he looked up at her in his frank, smiling way.

  ‘Wilt thou listen, Heavenly Eyes?’

  ‘I hear thee, Yarghouz.’

  ‘Listen then, Keuke Mongol. Take life from us as we offer it. Life is sweet. Erlik, like a spider, waits in darkness for lost souls that flutter to his net.’

  ‘You think my soul was lost there in the temple, Yarghouz?’

  ‘Unutterably lost, little temple girl of Yian. Therefore, live. Take life as a gift!’

  ‘Whose gift?’

  ‘Sanang’s.’

  ‘It is written,’ she said gravely, ‘that we belong to God and we return to him. Now then, Yezidee, do your duty as I do mine! Kai!’

  At the sound of the formula always uttered by the sect of Assassins when about to do murder, the young man started and shrank back. The west wind blew fresh in his startled eyes.

  ‘Sorceress,’ he said less firmly, ‘you leave your Yiort to come all alone into this forest and seek me. Why then have you come, if not to submit! – if not to take the gift of life – if not to turn away from your seducers who are hunting me, and who have corrupted you?’

  ‘Yarghouz, I come to slay you,’ she said quietly.

  Suddenly the man snarled at her, flung the shroud at her feet and crept deliberately to the left.

  ‘Be careful!’ she cried sharply; ‘look what you’re about! Stand still, son of a dog! May your mother bewail your death!’

  Yarghouz edged toward the west, clasping in his right hand the flask of gas.

  ‘Sorceress,’ he laughed, ‘a witch of Thibet prophesied with a drum that the three purities, the nine perfections, and the nine times nine felicities shall be lodged in him who slays the treacherous temple girl, Keuke Mongol! There is more magic in this bottle which I grasp than in thy mind and body. Heavenly Eyes! I pray God to be merciful to this soul I send to Erlik!’

  All the time he was advancing, edging cautiously around the circle of little plumy pines; and already the wind struck his left cheek.

  ‘Yarghouz Khan!’ cried the girl in her clear voice. ‘Take up your shroud and repeat the fatha!’

  ‘Backward!’ laughed the young man, ‘—as do you, Keuke Mongol!’

  ‘Heretic!’ she retorted. ‘Do you also refuse to name the ten Imaums in your prayers? Dog! Toad! Spittle of Erlik! May all your cattle die and all your horses take the glanders and all your dogs the mange!’

  ‘Silence, sorceress!’ he shouted, pale with fear and fury. ‘Witch! Mud worm! May Erlik seize you! May your skin be covered with putrefying sores! May all the demons torment you! May God remember you in hell!’

  ‘Yarghouz! Stand still!’

  ‘Is your word then the Rampart of Gog and Magog, you young witch of Yian, that a Khan of the Seventh Tower need fear you!’ he sneered, stealing stealthily westward through the feathery pines.

  ‘I give thee thy last chance, Yarghouz Khan,’ she said in an excited voice that trembled. ‘Recite thy prayer naming the ten, because with their holy names upon thy lips thou mayest escape damnation. For I am here to slay thee, Yarghouz! Take up thy shroud and pray!’

  The young man felt the west wind at the back of his left ear. Then he began to laugh.

  ‘Heavenly Eyes,’ he said, ‘thy end is come – together with the two police who hide in the pines yonder behind thee! Behold the bottle magic of Yarghouz Khan!’

  And he lifted the glass flask in the moonlight as though he were about to smash it at her feet.

  Then a terrible thing occurred. The entire flask glowed red hot in his grasp; and the man screamed and strove convulsively to fling the bottle; but it stuck to his hand, melted into the smoking flesh.

  Then he screamed again – or tried to – but his entire lower jaw came off and he stood there with the awful orifice gaping in the moonlight – stood, reeled a moment – and then – and then – his whole face slid off, leaving nothing but a bony mask out of which burst shriek after shriek—

  Keuke Mongol had fainted dead away. Cleves took her into his arms.

  Recklow, trembling and deathly white, went over to the thing that lay among the young pines and forced himself to bend over it.

  The glass flask still stuck to one charred hand, but it was no longer hot. And Recklow rolled the unspeakable thing into the white shroud and pushed it into the swamp.

  An evil ooze took it, slowly sucked it under and engulfed it. A few stinking bubbles broke.

  Recklow went back to the little glade among the pines.

  A young girl lay sobbing convulsively in her husband’s arms, asking God’s pardon and his for the justice she had done upon an enemy of all mankind.

  THE SIGN OF VENUS

  In the card-room the game, which had started from a chance suggestion, bid fair to develop into an all-night séance: the young foreign diplomat had shed his coat and lighted a fresh cigar; somebody threw a handkerchief over the face of the clock, and a sleepy club-servant took reserve orders for two dozen siphons and other details.

  ‘That lets me out,’ said Hetherford, rising from his chair with a nod at the dealer. He tossed his cards on the table, settled side obligations with the man on his left, yawned, and put on his hat.

  Somebody remonstrated. ‘It’s only two o’clock, Hetherford; you have no white man’s burden sitting up for you at home.’

  But Hetherford shook his head, smiling.

  So a servant removed his chair, another man cut in, the dealer dealt cards all around. Presently from somewhere in the smoke haze came a voice, ‘Hearts.’ And a quiet voice retorted, ‘I double it.’

  Hetherford lingered a moment, then turned on his heel, sauntered out across the hallway and down the stairs into the court, refusing with a sign the offered cab.

  Breathing deeply, yawning once or twice, he looked up at the stars. The night air refreshed him; he stood a moment, thoughtfully contemplating his half-smoked cigar, then tossed it away and stepped out into the street.

  The street was quiet and deserted; darkened brownstone mansions stared at him through sombre windows as he passed; his footsteps echoed across the pavement like the sound of footsteps following him.

  His progress was leisurely; the dreary monotony of the house fronts soothed him. He whistled a few bars of a commonplace tune, crossed the deserted avenue under the electric lamps, and entered the dimly lighted street beyond.

  Here all was silence; the doors of many houses were boarded up – sign that their tenants had migrated to the country. No shadowy cat fled along the iron railings at his approach; no night-watchman prowled in deserted dooryards or peered at him from obscurity.

  Strolling at ease, thoughts nowhere, he had traversed half the block, when an opening door and a glimmer of light across the sidewalk attracted his attention.

  As he approached the house whence the light came, a figure suddenly appeared on the stoop – a girl in a white ball-gown – hastily descending the stone steps. Gaslight from the doorway tinted her bared arms and shoulders. She bent her graceful head and gazed earnestly at Hetherford.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ she almost whispered, ‘might I ask you to please help me?’

  Hetherford stopped and wheeled short.

  ‘I – I really beg your pardon,’ she said, ‘but I am in such distress. Could I ask you to find me a cab?’

  ‘A cab!’ he repeated, uncertainly; ‘why, yes – I will with pleasure—�
�� he turned and looked up and down the deserted street, slowly lifting his hand to his short mustache. ‘If you are in a hurry,’ he said, ‘I had better go to the nearest stables—’

  ‘But there is something more,’ she said, in a tremulous voice. ‘Could you get me a wrap – a cloak – anything to throw over my gown?’

  He looked up at her, bewildered. ‘Why, I don’t believe I—’ he began, then fell silent before her troubled gaze. ‘I’ll do anything I can for you,’ he said, abruptly. ‘I have a raincoat at the club – if your need is urgent—’

  ‘It is urgent; but there is something else – something more urgent – more difficult for me to ask you. I must go to Willow Brook – I must go now, tonight! And I – I have no money.’

  ‘Do you mean Willow Brook in Westchester?’ he asked, astonished. ‘There is no train at this hour of the morning!’

  ‘Then – then what am I to do?’ she faltered. ‘I cannot stay another moment in that house.’

  After a silence he said, ‘Are you afraid of anybody in that house?’

  ‘There is nobody in the house,’ she said, with a shudder; ‘my mother is in Westchester; all the household are there. I – I came back – a few moments ago – unexpectedly—’ She stammered, and winced under his keen scrutiny; then the pallor of utter despair came into her cheeks, and she hid her white face in her hands.

  Hetherford watched her for a moment.

  ‘I don’t exactly understand,’ he said, gently, ‘but I’ll do anything I can for you. I’ll go to the club and get my raincoat; I’ll go to the stables and get a cab; I haven’t any money with me, but it would take only a few minutes for me to drive to the club and get some … Please don’t be distressed; I’ll do anything you desire.’

  She dropped her arms with a hopeless gesture.

  ‘But you say there is no train!’

  ‘You could drive to the house of some of your friends—’

  ‘No, no! Oh, my friends must never know of this!’

  ‘I see,’ he said, gravely.

  ‘No, you don’t see,’ she said, unsteadily. ‘The truth is that I am almost frightened to death.’

  ‘Can you not tell me what has frightened you so?’

  ‘If I tried to tell you, you would think me mad – you would indeed—’