Page:Weird Tales v01n04 (1923-06).djvu/46

Rh put the thought from him, turning to the perusal of a telegram in code which he had found waiting for him at the desk; translated, it read:

""With you Thursday with four, six, twenty-one, and the others. Look for thirty-three. "CHILDERS.""

But there was no time to be lost. Thursday was tomorrow. He would have to take his chance of their finding him, for there was nobody whom he could trust. Ellison had gone, even if he might have chanced the giant in so delicate a matter; Del Kane, likewise. He must take his chance. Striding to the door, he stiffened abruptly at a drumming rap, and a hoarse voice in the corridor without:

"Open up in there; open up!"

Annister, a pulse in his temple beating to his hard-held breath, jerked back the door, to face—

Bristow, behind him three men whom he recognized as hangers-on at the hotel bar. They had something of the look of long-riders, villainous, hard-bitten; as one man, they grinned now, but without mirth, as the sheriff spoke:

"Annister—I arrest you for the murder of Tucson Charlie Westervelt and Bartley Pattison. In th' name of th' Law!"

Annister knew that if he resisted they would shoot him down; in fact, he knew, too, that was what they wanted; it would be the easiest way. Under the menace of the guns, he spread his hands, palms downward, preceding the four men down the stairs outward to the jail.

But as the heavy door clanged shut behind him, Annister, his gaze in a sightless staring into the north, groaned, in bitterness of spirit.

Mary was needing him; she was in peril, the greater because it was unknown—and—he would not be there.

HOUSE OF SILENCE, broken at times by a weird wailing as from the Pit; a house of dreams, gray in the moonlight, under the leprous-silvered finger of the moon, brooding now, a grim, gray fortress of the damned: the stronghold of the Beast.

Dense pines grew about. it, so that when the wind wailed among them, like the wailing of a lost soul, it met and mingled with an eerie ululation rising as if muffled by many thicknesses of walls, to end, after a little, with a quick shriek and a sudden hush, with, after a moment, the faint echo of a taunting laugh.

That laugh would have struck terror to the swart soul of a lucivee, if lucivees have souls, for it was like an eldritch howling, faint and thin; like the thin, tinkling laughter of a fiend, without pity and without ruth.

Here, in the sanitarium of Doctor Elphinstone, there were secrets within seerets, walls within walls, downward, as in Dante's Seventh Hell, and from this monastery of the hopeless there penetrated, on occasion, outward from its battlemented walls, wild, frantic laughter, but there was nothing demoniac about it, because it was the laughter of the insane.

But that other laughter, like a sound heard in dreams—passers-by, if there were any such, hearing it, would shudder, and pass on. Fr the secret of that house of doom was a secret, terrible and grim; a secret, for him who might have guessed at it, to be whispered behind locked doors and with bated breath. And there had been those who had whispered of the lost souls within those walls, and the whisper ran that they were, indeed, madmen who had not been always mad, because—they had become such after their commitment to the bleak house within the wood.

These were but whispers, merely, for the power upon that house was not alone the power of Evil, rising like a dark tide among the pines; for in Dry Bone, and beyond it, in Palos Verde and Mojave, it was rumored that the strong arm of the Law upheld it, or such law, say, as might have issued from the devious hand of Hamilton Rook.

Once—and it was never repeated—a man had come there from the capital; he had demanded to see the doctor's patients; that had been a long time in the past.

And as the investigator had stood there, viewing with a faint, creeping horror the nondescripts paraded before him, gibbering, mouthing, in an inarticulate, furious babble, a man had burst suddenly from the line with a strangled cry:

"Jerry—don't you know me? I'm Humiston—Newbold"

The voice had been the voice of Humiston, but the face—it had been the face of another, totally unlike; there had been no possible resemblance. But the man had been—sane. The investigator was persuaded of that; suffering under a peculiar delusion; indeed, but sane.

The man had rushed forward then, baring his arm; and there, on that thin, pitiful flesh that had once been healthy and hard, there ran a curious design in red; the investigator sucked in his breath as that tell-tale birth-mark sprang, livid, under his gaze. For he had seen it before.

The doctor's eyes had narrowed to slits; somehow, the man from the capital had gained the impression that it was the first time that he had seen that mark. But the investigator could do nothing. Birth-marks can be duplicated. He had waited then, in a curious indecision as the bearded doctor had interposed a suave:

"Well, of course, Commissioner, you're quite aware, or you should be, how it is: these paranoiacs are noted for their delusions—ah—megalocephalic tendencies, I should say They believe themselves to be—someone else, and always a bank president, say, a famous actor, an author, a great general  Now—Mr. Humiston—you knew him, I believe?" Beneath the silken tone there ran suddenly a hint of iron, of menace, veiled but actual; the investigator felt it. "This patient knew your name, of course," the suave voice had continued. "Poor fellow—we must be gentle with him."

And there the matter had ended. Curiously enough, the man who had claimed to be Banker Humiston had, after that first burst of frenzied speech, kept silent. Perhaps that mordant gleaming in the doctor's eyes had telegraphed a warning, a message, a command.

But the investigator went home, oddly shaken, to dream, like Pilate's wife, of a white face with staring eyes which changed, even as he gazed, into the face of his friend, Newbold Humiston; to hear, even in his dream, a voice, and it was the voice of the living, and of the dead.

N A BARE CELL, six feet by six—a cubicle in which there was barely sufficient head room for a tall man to stand upright—a figure stood with its hands clenched upon the bars, staring outward at the grim wood visible to the south.

Travis Annister had abode here in this living tomb three weeks now, three centuries, in which, as in a nightmare of cold horror, he had been aware merely of a face, three-pointed, bearded, the eyes active with a malign intelligence, the lips smiling always with the cold smile of death.

Twice a day the small panel in his cell door had slid backward without sound, to frame, in the opening, the face of Dr. Elphinstone, like a face without a body, and without a soul.

The father of Black Steve Annister knew that it was not dream that would