Page:Weird Tales v01n04 (1923-06).djvu/47

46 pass, because, on the second day, the head had spoken, Travis Annister was scarcely a coward; he had fought like a baited grizzly when surprised in his Summer camp by the men who had brought him, under cover of the night, to this prison-house beyond the pale.

Now, at the voice, like the slow drip of an acid, Annister stared straight before him, with the gaze of a man who has abandoned hope:

"My dear Mr. Annister," the voice had whispered, "the little matter of that check, if you please You will make it out to 'Cash' Ah, that is good; I perceive you are—wise."

It had not been the pistol in the lean, clawlike hand; nor the eyes, even, brooding-upon him with the impersonal, cold staring of a cobra; Travis Annister might have refused if it had not been for those sounds that he had heard, the sights that he had seen when, taken at midnight from his cubicle, he had beheld the administration of the Cone.

And, like Macbeth, with that one sight, and the sight of that which came after, he had "supped full of horrors," until now, at the bidding of that toneless voice, he had obeyed. Three times thereafter, at the command of his dark jailer, he had paid tribute, nor had he been, of all that lost battalion, the single victim; there had been others.

Now, separated from him scarce a dozen feet, a girl with golden hair sat, huddled, eyes in a sightless staring upon the stone floor of her cell. Cleo Ridgley had not been killed; she had been saved for a fate—beside which death would be a little thing—a fate unspeakable, even as had—Number Thirty-three.

Mary Allerton, removed from the others by a narrow corridor running crosswise in the cell-block, watched and waited now for the signal of the man to whom she had dispatched that message, it seemed, a century in the past.

That morning they had found the rope; they had removed it without comment, while the ophidian gaze of the dark Doctor had been bent upon her with what she fancied had been a queer, speculative look: a look of anticipation, and of something more. So far she had been treated decently enough; her cell was wide and airy, plainly but comfortably furnished; but as to that look in the gray-green eyes of the Master of Black Magie—she was not so sure:

There came a sudden movement in the corridor without; a panting, a snuffling, and the quick pad-pad of marching feet. Mary, her eye to the keyhole of that door, could see but dimly; she made out merely the sheeted figures, like grim, gliding ghosts; the figure, rigid; on the stretcher, moving, silent, on its rubber-tired wheels. Then, at an odor stealing inward through the key-hole, she recoiled.

That perfume had been sickish-sweet, overpowering, dense and yet sharp with a faint, acrid sweetness; the odor of ether. And then, although she could not see it, a man in the next cell had risen, white-faced, from his cot, to sink back limply as the dark hand, holding that inverted cone, had swept downward to his face.

A choked gurgle, a strangled, sharp cry, penetrating outward in a vague shadow of clamor—and then. silence, with the faint whisper of the wind among the pines, the brool of the rushing river, the faint, half-audible foot-falls passing and repassing in that corridor of the dead.

RAVIS ANNISTER sprang to his feet as the narrow door swung open to press backward against the window-bars as the High-Priest of Horror, followed by his familiars, cowled and hooded, entered with a slow, silent step. The Doctor spoke, and his voice was like a chill wind:

"My friend, I bring you—forgetfulness A brief Lethe of hours  And then—ah, then, you will be a. new man, a man re-born, my friend  Now "

Annister, his face gray with a sort of hideous strain, stared silent, white-lipped, as, at a low-voiced order, the attendants came forward.

The lean hand reached forward; it poised, darted, swooped; and in it was the Cone.

LONE IN HIS CELL beneath the court-house, Black Steve Annister sat in silence, gazing northward through the barred window to where, invisible in the thick darkness just across the street, the road ran, straight as an arrow from the bow, to that dark forest brooding in a changeless silence where lay the House of Fear.

Childers would have had his wire long since; but by the time that help could come it would be—too late. Annister, fatalistic after a fashion, felt this to be the fact even as he hoped against hope.

But they were many, and he was but one. Tomorrow—it would be too late.

Head bowed in his hands, oblivious, at first he had heard it as a thin whisper, like a knife blade against the silence; it penetrated inward now, with the dull rasp of metal upon metal from without:

Sit tight, old-timer; I'm comin' through!"

There came a muffled thud, a twist; Annister, reaching forth a hand, found it clasped in thick groping fingers. Then, as he thrust head and shoulders through the sundered bars, a Shadow uprose, gigantic, against the stars; the voice came again, in a quick, rumbling whisper:

"It's me, old-timer—Bull."

Annister, crawling through the opening, alighted upon soft turf. He heard Ellison's low chuckle as, following the giant, he passed along the lee of the building to where, showing merely as a black blot against the night, there stood an automobile, its engine just turning over, with the low, even purr of harnessed power; at twenty paces it was scarcely audible above the rising of the wind.

"Tank's full," said Ellison. "Now—"

He turned abruptly as a dim figure rose upward just beyond. For a moment Annister set himself for the onslaught; then his hand went out; it gripped the hard hand of Del Kane.

"Ellison done told me, Mr. Annister," he said. "An' so I come a-fannin' an' a-foggin' this away from Mojave; certain-sure I don't aim to leave no friend of mine hog-tied in no calaboose!"

Annister, his heart warming to these friends, debated with himself; then turned to Ellison with a sudden movement.

"Bull," he said. "I'm putting my cards on the table with you and Del, here."

He told them briefly of the message from Mary, the need of haste; then, of his mission, and of the help that was even now due, or would be, with the morning. If they were coming with him, northward along that road of peril, word must be left behind.

Kane thought a moment; then, wheeling swiftly, with muttered word, he disappeared in the darkness, to return presently with the good news that he had fixed it with the station-agent. The latter had just come on; he was a friend of Kane's, and no friend of Rook and Company; he would see to it, Kane said, that the reinforcements would he warned.

Boarding the car, they swung out cautiously along the silent street, under the pale stars, northward along that shadowy road. Presently there would be a moon; but just now they went onward in a thick darkness, with, just ahead, the dim loom of the road, flowing backward under the wheels, which presently ran like a-ribbon of pale flame under the bright beam of the lights.