Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 4 (1924-12).djvu/89

88 Two men mounted to the driver's seat, one sat on either of the flaring sides and two climbed in at the rear.

The motor spun. There was the grinding of the meshing gears, and soon they were out upon the city's thoroughfare. With darkened lamps, the car crept on to the unpaved streets of the sleeping suburbs.

A quick turn that threw the bound body to one side, and the motor belched aloud. Now they were safe. The lights flared out into the murkiness of an unlighted night. Down went the lever on the quadrant and the car lunged forward furiously.

N AND on they went, over rough and smooth, up hill and down; a black, humming demon in the stillness of the damp, pitch-black night.

There was a whispered word. The motor was slowed down and, at a divergence of the road, the car leaped to the left. For miles they bumped along a narrow, timber-flanked byway.

Again the engine ceased to labor; the brakes creaked and squealed. The car stopped suddenly.

"We have arrived!" came a voice from the driver's seat.

Three distinct taps on the floor of the car.

"All out!" rasped six voices in unison.

Twelve human feet hit the leaf-strewn ground at the same instant. All went to the rear of the car. Six black-robed men faced toward the bound one.

It was the leader's frigid monotone that rent the moment's silence:

"Unbuckle the straps that hold him to the plank! Remove the burlap! Untie his feet, but give him not the freeness of his hands!"

Five men took their places quickly, each man to his particular task. Pantzar was dragged out and stood upright. The men worked fast, and soon he was blinking in the dazzling glare of a powerful electric bulb.

Six men with coal-black beards of equal length formed in a semicircle in front of him; each dressed in black, a tight cap of the same color pulled far down over his ears.

Pantzar glanced from one to the other. His lips were for a moment paralyzed. Again, he momentarily gazed at each of the six men in turn. His small blue eyes glistened under the gray canopy of his hair; his emaciated face quivered; his purple lips parted, and he breathed long and deeply.

"The Black Temple Band!" he gasped aloud.

"You're right, for once, you old image-maker!" sneered one.

"You super-mystic!" hissed another with a fiendish smile

"I am not the maker of the lifelike, skeleton figures," pleaded Pantzar, "Louvili is the creator."

"Ha! Ha!" sneered the leader. Tis none but Pantzar's hand that shapes the images of our dead, and makes them mechanically perfect, that this degraded Louvili may use them for his designing purposes—a disgrace."

A sardonic hiss went round the semicircle.

Pantzar's deep-sunken, blue eyes snapped, his wan face grew tense, and the straight-cut, livid lips parted.

"Then you, that you do accuse me, must be the husband of the leather dealer's wife," he asserted, firmly. Twas your burlap that—"

A heavy hand clapped quickly over the speaker's mouth, and a deep voice sounded:

"No more of this! You know one of our number, we admit. By studying deeper, your acknowledgment and the rapid succession of thoughts you pursued to arrive at this recognition prove to us that you are unquestionably the one whom we did this night seek."

"Silence!" commanded the leader. "Speak no longer thus in so densely