Page:Weird Tales volume 02 number 03.djvu/57

56 those times I caught him listening at keyholes, while he lived with us."

"It was his right to know!" she flashed.

"He thought anything he chose to do was his right," Eric replied. "He didn't know the meaning of loyalty—" he stopped, as a startling thought occurred to him.

"By Heaven!" he cried, "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he's the traitor those Devil Worshipers are trying to discover. It would be just like him."

Judith's ghastly face showed that his guess had hit the mark.

"Hush!" she gasped. "They would tear him to pieces if they knew! Julius suspects already, but is afraid to say anything without more proof. I begged Sebastian not to do it, but he wanted to get more money so we two could go away. You won't betray him?"

"Not unless I find it necessary for our own protection," he answered coolly.

The soft thud of a gently-closed door broke through their preoccupation. Eric whirled around, his eyes seeking the guard under the bench. The guard was gone. Eric flung open the door and heard someone running swiftly down the passage.

"But he must have heard everything," cried Judith when he told her. "He has gone to tell them. Only Sebastian can control them, and he is unconscious—Oh what can we do!"

She wrung her hands. Then she looked intently at Eric.

"You are very much alike," she said, half under her breath. "I believe we can do it. We will have to risk it. Pick up Sebastian and come with me."

Realizing that for the moment their interests were one, Eric obeyed. Judith led them to her own room, and while Eric placed Sebastian on a couch Judith went into an inner room from which she brought a small square box.

"This is a make-up box," she said, opening it, and taking out a number of little jars and brushes. "We use it in certain ceremonies. Sit down!"

Eric sat down in the chair she indicated. It was placed close beside Sebastian's couch, and at last he began to guess at her purpose.

"You think I can pass for him?" he asked doubtingly.

"Yes!" declared Judith, "You have the same build and coloring and your voices are alike. Now, be still while I paint the scars on your face."

Swiftly, but with infinite care, her long clever fingers worked on Eric's face. With brush and grease paint and flesh-colored court plaster, she reproduced Sebastian's dreadful scars, line for line, gash for gash, twist for twist. And as she worked she instructed Eric in the ritual for dismissing the Devil-Worshipers to the long sleep that always intervened between the orgy and the sacrifice. The ritual was short and Eric mastered it just as she completed her task.

She led him up to a long mirror and his doubts of her plan left him as he gazed at his reflection. He would have sworn that it was his cousin who faced him in the mirror.

Judith detached from Sebastian's hand a strange ring of some flesh-colored metal, wide and thick like an old-fashioned wedding ring, with no stone or setting.

She slipped it on Eric's right hand where it seemed to become invisible, so closely did it resemble the human skin.

"If you cannot manage them, pass your hand through the altar fires and seize their leader," she told him. "But mind you must touch the devil-fire first."

Concluding that she, too, was tainted with all these evil terrors, he promised lightly.

Then she handed him Sebastian's heavy whip.

"Be violent," she warned, "Rage and storm and carry things with a high hand. That is how he keeps his hold on them. When you have dismissed them, come back here and we can plan to get out."

"What about Senta," asked Eric.

"We will hide in a place I know," answered Judith. Putting her arm around Senta, she looked straight into Eric's distrustful eyes. "If anything should happen to you, I will get her out of this place at any cost," she promised earnestly. "They shall not have her. Indeed, you can trust her to me."

"I believe I can," said Eric, clasping her hand.

Senta clutched his arm.

"If you're going into danger—I want to go, too. Oh, take me with you!" she implored as he caught her into his arms.

He kissed her once and put her down.

"That's impossible, sweetheart." he answered. "It would only increase thedanger."

Making sure that his pistol was ready to hand, he closed the door behind him and went down the passage as Judith had directed.

The vast hall was in an uproar. The mob surged this way and that, some calling for one course of action, some for another, but all joined in execrating Sebastian. The very chaos was in his favor, Eric realized, as he stood unnoticed in the shadow of the Devil Statue. It behooved him to act quickly, before Julius or another could assume the leadership and weld all that disorganized malevolence into one death-dealing purpose.

With a swift leap, he cleared the now blazing altar fires and was standing upright on the altar before the frenzied horde knew he was near. There was an instant, deathlike silence. Those nearest the altar fell back.

Above the leaping flames, Eric gazed down into the sea of vicious faces, and watched their flushed hatred fade into cringing fear. For the first time he considered the faces individually, and with difficulty repressed a cry as he recognized in a creature with streaming hair and swollen features, a pretty débutante with whom he had danced a few nights ago. Several of the men he knew, too. Clubmen and men about town, like Schuyler Van Tassell, whose mutilated body now lay at his feet. The very common-placeness of their outward life made him realize how appallingly far the dreadful stream of pollution had run.

While they were still under the spell of his sudden appearance, he began the ritual of dismissal that Judith had taught him.

For a moment he was not interrupted. Then, with a yell in which hatred and fear and rage were equally blended, Julius sprang out from the crowd and stood in front of the altar.

"The flames of Hell cannot shield you!" he shrieked. "Death to the traitor—slow death!"

"Death!" howled the Devil-worshipers, surging forward. Eric laughed.

"Death!" he cried, in Sebastian's mocking tone. "Is that your worst? Then see what Satan's High Priest can inflict!"

Still closely imitating Sebastian's rather grandiloquent gestures, he swept his hand through the flames, seized Julius by the throat and jerked him up to the altar.

The agonized screech that burst from Julius, surprised Eric as much as it terrorized the Devil-Worshipers. He had merely been playing for time—bluffing, in fact—and he knew his grasp had not been sufficiently hard to cause such pain. For the man had fallen on his face, twisting and clutching his throat, but after that first cry, making no sound except a strangled whimper.

Forgetting his role, Eric set Julius on his feet, but almost dropped him at sight of his face. For he was smiling—a dreadful vacant smile. His hands fell away from his throat and he began to play idly with Eric's flowing sleeve, the whimpering merged into a hoarse tuneless humming.

The horrid abruptness with which the passionate, purposeful man had changed