Page:Weird Tales volume 28 number 03.djvu/119



ROM the black woods beside the trail rose a shriek of blood-curdling laughter. Slavering, mouthing sounds followed it, so strange and garbled that at first I did not recognize them as human words. Their unhuman intonations sent a chill down my spine.

"Dead men!" the inhuman voice chanted. "Dead men with torn throats! There will be dead men among the pines before dawn! Dead men! Fools, you are all dead!"

Ashley and I both fired in the direction of the voice, and in the crashing reverberations of our shots the ghastly chant was drowned. But the weird laugh rang out again, deeper in the woods, and then silence closed down like a black fog, in which I heard the semi-hysterical gasping of the girl. She had released Ashley and was clinging frantically to me. I could feel the quivering of her lithe body against mine. Probably she had merely followed her feminine instinct to seek refuge with the strongest; the light of the match had shown her that I was a bigger man than Ashley.

"Hurry, for God's sake!" Ashley's voice sounded strangled. "It can't be far to the cabin. Hurry! You'll come with us, Mr. Garfield?"

"What was it?" the girl was panting. "Oh, what was it?"

"A madman, I think," I answered, tucking her trembling little hand under my left arm. But at the back of my head was whispering the grisly realization that no madman ever had a voice like that. It sounded—God!—it sounded like some bestial creature speaking with human words, but not with a human tongue!...

You will not want to miss this grim novelette of stark horror—of the terrible disfigurement inflicted upon Adam Grimm by the dark priests of Inner Mongolia, and the frightful vengeance that pursued his enemy to the United States and tracked him down in the Louisiana woods. It will be published complete in the November issue of :

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