Page:The Thrill Book Volume 1 Issue 1 (1919-03-01).djvu/8

6 way, nonot [sic] even giving his beloved wife an opportunity to dissuade him.

The awful story of his supposed crime formed the contents of his letter to my mother. Oh, if he had only come to her instead of taking that final step! My mother knew that he had laid by her side all that night. She taxed Serge, who laughed fiendishly, and admitted that he had lied to my father, thus forcing him to take his own life.

“Clearing the way very thoughtfully for his successcr,” said he sardonically.

Struck to the heart by the horror of the revelation, my mother attempted to flee with me, but Serge had given out that she was mentally unbalanced; we were stopped and forced to return. With scorn and loathing in her heart, she rebuffed his suit daily. But one afternoon, as I sat with my mother, embroidering, I felt his eyes upon me strangely. He was regarding me with such an expression that I suddenly feared him horribly, sprang up with a cry, and rushed to my mother’s side. She caught me to her with a gasp of such anguish that it seems as if I could hear it now.

“Was not one victim enough for you?” she asked.

“Well,” he returned with insolent indifference, “I was just wondering if, after all, I ought not to prefer the bud to the blossom.”

There was a long pause. Then my mother said in a strange, hard voice: “You have won. Give me this one night in peace.” And she still held me to her, while her labored breath shook her entire body.

Serge went slowly away with a backward smile, hatefully exposing his sharp white teeth with an air of knowing triumph.

My mother locked the door. She barred the window. Then she sat down, pulled me down beside her, and whispered the whole awful truth to me. I listened, my brain whirling, for it appeared to me that what they said must be true; and that my mother’s mind had been injured by my father’s tragic death.

Little by little, however, convinced by her deadly seriousness, by my father’s letter, and by my own emotions of fear and horror when in the presence of my guardian, I began to credit her. I saw but one thing to do, and that was to attempt escape, even if we died in the attempt. My mother was firm in her intention to kill herself rather than fall into those evil hands, and, while she said nothing to me, I knew she would not leave me behind her. We whispered our plans to escape that very night. With youth’s optimism I knew I could find something to do that would support my mother and myself. And in spite of her anxiety, my mother smiled her lovely smiles at me again for the first time in months.

When the house was sleeping soundly we crept out on the porch roof, and my mother slipped down a pillar to the ground, turning to hold out her arms to me. I was halfway down the roof when my mother’s voice rang out in an agony of fear and horror.

“Vera, Vera, go back! Save yourself! The revolver! My God, it is the wolf of the steppes!”

As she cried out to me I saw a huge shape as of some great shaggy beast spring upon her from the darkness, bearing her to the ground. Something raised its head from where she lay, her cries silenced forever, and I roused myself from my apathy of deadly fear to scramble back into my window, away from the horror of those terrible fiery eyes, red and evil, that looked leering upon me from over my unfortunate mother’s dead body. My senses were failing me, but I managed to get back into the room, and had hardly closed and fastened the shutter before I heard the thud of a heavy body upon the porch roof.

My mother’s words echoed in my dizzy brain: “Save yourself, Vera! The revolver——” I looked about me hastily in the dim candlelight. On my mother’s dressing table I saw a revolver, and I caught it up, crying out to the Thing that waited without: “If you try to break in here, I shall shoot you. I am armed.”

The Thing sniffed around the window frame for a few moments, then sprang to the ground. I felt my senses leaving me, and I fell back on my mother’s bed, unconscious.

With morning came voices, shrieks, feet running here and there, knockings on my door. I dared not open; I was terribly afraid of everything and everybody in that awful house. I heard my guardian's exclamations of horror at the discovery of my mother’s mangled body, and it seemed to me as if I could not live through those moments of intense suffering. How I got through the day without losing my mind I do not know; I do remember that I lost myself in periods of unconsciousness several times.

Toward evening came the voice of my guardian at the door, stern and commanding. “Open at once, foolish girl!” he demanded,

I kept silence.

“If you do not open to me at once, Vera, I shall be obliged to break in the door.”

“If you try to come in,” I replied with desperate bravado, "I have a bullet ready for you.”

He laughed with cold scorn, “Hunger will drive you out soon enough,” he commented aloud. “But it will be better for you in the end to open now than later.”

I felt that his words hid a mystery too terrible for explanation. But I remained firm. I was convinced that between Serge and the wolf of the steppes there was some evil connection.

After a while he seemed to have gone away, for I heard no sound. But at last came a sniffing around the cracks of the door and the scratching of sharp claws on the panels. He had sent the Thing that had killed my mother! Oh, how pitiless he was! I had heard of the wolf of the steppes, but had believed it only a superstition, yet my intuition told me that that which waited without was not a dog.

I cried out to it to go away, and finally it went, only to come to my window, whining and snarling there and scratching at the shutters.

“Go away!” I called again, cold fear clutching at my heart. “If anything tries to come in at this window I shall shoot on sight.”

The howlings died away. Ominous silence ensued. I heard only the soft thud as the beast landed on the ground before the porch. You may well imagine what a night I passed, knowing that perhaps the Thing waited beneath my window. Just as morning broke I peered through a chink in the shutter and saw it for the first time. It was a great, gray, shaggy wolf; it