Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 12.djvu/54

1132 He pointed to the hands. The wrists were covered with torn rags of a heavy shirt. The hands themselves were—stumps! The fingers had been bent into the palms and the flesh had been worn to the bone. They looked like the feet of a little black elephant! My eyes traveled down the body. Around the waist was a heavy band of yellow metal. From it fell a ring and a dozen links of shining white chain!

“What is he? Where did he come from?” said Anderson. “Look, he's fast asleep—yet even in his sleep his arms try to climb and his feet draw themselves up one after the other! And his knees —how in God's name was he ever able to move on them?”

It was even as he said. In the deep sleep that had come upon the crawler, arms and legs kept raising in a deliberate, dreadful climbing motion. It was as though they had a life of their own—they kept their movement independently of the motionless body. They were semaphoric motions. If you have ever stood at the back of a train and watched the semaphores rise and fall you will know exactly what I mean.

Abruptly the overhead whispering ceased. The shaft of light dropped and did not rise again. The crawling man became still. A gentle glow began to grow around us. The short Alaskan summer night was over. Anderson rubbed his eyes and turned me a haggard face.

“Man!” he exclaimed. “You look as though you have been sick!”

“No more than you, Starr!” I said. “That was sheer, stark horror! What do you make of it all?”

“I'm thinking our only answer lies there,” he answered, pointing to the figure that lay so motionless under the blankets we had thrown over him. “Whatever they were—that's what they were after. There was no aurora about those lights, Frank. It was like the flaring up of some queer hell the preacher folk never frightened us with.”

“We'll go no further to-day,” I said. “I wouldn't wake him up for all the gold that runs between the fingers of the five peaks—nor for all the devils that may be behind them.”

The crawling man lay in a sleep as deep as the Styx. We bathed and bandaged the pads that had been his hands. Arms and legs were as rigid as though they were crutches. He did not move while we worked over him. He lay as he had fallen, the arms a trifle raised, the knees bent.

I began filing the band that ringed the sleeper's waist. It was gold, but it was like no gold I had ever handled. Pure gold is soft. This was soft too—but it had an unclean, viscid life of its own.

It clung to the file and I could have sworn that it writhed like a live thing when I cut into it. I gashed through it, bent it away from the body and hurled it away. It was—loathsome!

All that day the crawler slept. Darkness came and still he slept. But that night there was no shaft of blue haze from behind the peaks, no questioning globes of light, no whispering. Some spell of horror seemed withdrawn—but not far. Both Anderson and I felt that the menace was there, withdrawn perhaps, but waiting.

It was noon next day when the crawling man awoke. I jumped as the pleasant drawling voice sounded.

“How long have I slept?” he said. His pale blue eyes grew quizzical as I stared at him.

“A night—and almost two days,” I said.

“Were there any lights up there last night?” Ho nodded to the North eagerly. “Any whispering?”

“Neither,” I answered. His head fell back and he stared up at the sky.

“They've given it up, then?” he said at last.

“Who have given it up?” asked Anderson.

And once more—“The people of the pit!” the crawling man answered.

We stared at him and again faintly I, for one, felt that queer, maddening desire that the lights had brought with them.

“The people of the pit,” he repeated. “Things some god of evil made before the Flood and that somehow have escaped the good God's vengeance. They were calling me!” he added simply.

Anderson and I looked at each other, the same thought in both our minds.

“No,” said the crawling man, reading what it was, “I'm not insane. Give me a very little to drink. I'm going to die soon. Will you take me as f a r South as you can before I die? And afterwards will you build a fire and burn me? I want to be in such shape that no hellish wile of theirs can drag my body back to them. You'll do it when I've told you about them,” he said as we hesitated.

He drank the brandy and water we lifted to his lips.

“Arms and legs quite dead,” he said. “Dead as I'll be soon. Well, they did well for me. Now I'll tell you what's up there behind that hand. Hell!

“Listen. My name is Stanton—Sinclair Stanton. Class 1900, Yale. Explorer. I started away from Dawson last year to hunt for five peaks that rose like a hand in a haunted country and ran pure gold between them. Same thing you were after? I thought so. Late last fall my comrade sickened. I sent him back with some Indians. A little later my Indians found out what I was after. They ran away from me. I decided I'd stick, built a cabin, stocked myself with food and lay down to winter it. Did it not badly—it was a pretty mild winter you'll remember. In the spring I started off again. A little less than two weeks ago I sighted the five peaks. Not from this side though—the other. Give me some more brandy.”

“I'd made too wide a detour,” he went on. “I'd gotten too f a r north, I beat back. From this side you see nothing but forest straight up to the base of the hand. Over on the other side—”

He was silent for a moment.

“Over there is forest too. But it doesn't reach so far. No ! I came out of it. Stretching for miles in front of me was a level plain. It was as worn and ancient looking as the desert around the broken shell of Babylon. At its end rose the peaks. Between me and them—far off—was what looked like a low dike of rocks. Then—I ran across the road!”

“The road!” cried Anderson incredulously.

“The road,” said the crawling man. “A fine, smooth, stone road. It ran straight on to the