Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/98

Rh glowed and glowered at me like two disks of phosphorus in the half-light, and I remembered thinking for one awful moment—absurd as it may seem to you—of a quotation from 'Red Riding Hood.' Do you remember where she asks the wolf,' 'What great eyes you have, Grandmamma' and 'What great teeth you have, Grandmamma'? Those were the very words that popped into my mind, and their awful answers came running in their wake like the echo of a horror, I'll never be able to look at a book of fairy tales again, without a shudder; for since that night the story of 'Red Riding Hood' is a frightful ghost story to me, and a real one, a terribly real one.

"What the monster—I can't think of him as a man—would have done if he'd gotten to me, I don't know, and I don't like to speculate on it; but what I saw a few seconds later wakes me up screaming at night, sometimes, even now.

"While he was still fifteen or twenty feet away, a silly, little gray rabbit popped out of its hole in the rocks beside the tracks and scudded between us. As it flew past, the thing caught sight of it, and, seeming to forget me, gave chase. You know how fast a frightened rabbit can run, Professor? I assure you the poor little bunny didn't have a chance with that tall, lean pursuer on its track. He ran it down before it had covered a hundred yards. I heard the poor thing scream as he crushed it in his long, bony fingers, and lifted it, still struggling, to his mouth, and tore it to bits with his teeth.

"I ran as I'd never run before to my cottage, and got there more dead than alive, for every drop of blood in my veins seemed to be running cold as a night-sweat. My landlady shook her head when I told her what I'd seen, and said, 'Don't ee go out o' nights nae mair, Missie; for there do be bogles in the hills, an' I've heard me gran'faither say they crave human meat a' times.

ESPITE Shela's earnestness, I could not forbear a grin.

"We'll be looking for dead rabbit hunters; not live ones," I told her. "What you saw was probably some poor, half-starved tramp; maybe a lunatic escaped from some asylum."

"No," she insisted, "it wasn't. Nothing human could have looked like that thing. Please, please, Professor Warrener, don't go to Cag na Gith; I know something terrible will happen if you do. Why, I wouldn't go there, not even at midday, for all the money in the Bank of England."

"Possibly," I assented, "but we're looking for something more valuable than money: we're digging for relics of a vanished civilization."

To my astonishment, the little Irish-woman suddenly crossed herself.

"Digging?" she almost shrieked. "Digging? And in those hills? Professor Warrener, you don't know what you're doing. The country people wouldn't put a spade in one of those mounds for anything. They say the body of a bugwolf is buried there, and to turn the sod would liberate its spirit."

"A bugwolf?" I echoed. "That accounts for the condition of the dolmen and mounds. Fear of the werewolf has probably kept the peasantry away. Carew told me that the excellent state of the land, archeologically speaking, puzzled him. Your friend, the werewolf—or, as the Welshmen will have it, the bugwolf—has performed a valuable service to science. I'll have to propose him for honorary membership in the Society for Anthropological Research."

"Ah, Dr. Warrener, don't make light," Shela begged. "You scientists who don't believe in God nor devil think you know everything; but you don't. These stories of ghosts and werewolves are as old as humanity it-