Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 01.djvu/35

 on him, and he fell beneath the impact of the monster's driven weight.

Now the other wolves drew back and the frenzied yelping ceased. The leader was about to make his kill.

A thousand times de Grandin had looked straight-eyed in the skull-faced countenance of death, and always he had grinned at it. But now he did not grin. The snarling face above him was a wolf's, the fur was wolfish and the fangs were bestial, but through the beastly lineaments he recognized the face of Otto Wolfberg. His stomach retched with loathing as the grinning mouth drew near his throat. In a moment he would feel the sharp teeth tearing through his flesh, and he was powerless, for the man-wolf crouched upon him, holding down his legs with his back legs, pinioning his arms against the earth with his forepaws. "Mater salvatoris," he besought, "comes now a sinful soul. Pray thou for it"

His panted prayer was interrupted by a wild, fierce cry the like of which he'd never heard. Not quite a roar nor yet a scream, but blending the most fearsome part of each, it echoed and re-echoed through the werewolf-haunted wood.

The wolves heard it and were afraid. For the first time in their savage, man-beast lives they knew the paralyzing gripe of sheer, stark terror. And even as they turned in fright they knew the realization of their fear, for, apparently from nowhere, a dreadful thing was in their midst. It was a creature like a catamountain, but four times larger, with rippling soot-black fur and flashing eyes of green, and teeth like simitars and daws like sabers. It rushed among them, spreading death so swift it might have been a lightning bolt. At a single blow from its great paw a wolf lay belly-down with twitching legs and whimpering breath, its back snapped like a rotten twig; a sweep of its sword-studded talons, and skin and flesh and pelage ripped away from staring bones. The creature seized a great wolf in its jaws and shook it as a cat might shake a mouse, then tossed the carcass by contemptuously and struck two more beasts from its path as it made for the wolf-thing that worried at de Grandin's throat. Then with a roar it sprang.

The wolf-man turned to flee. The great cat-monster held its stroke and watched him till he almost readied the tangle of the undergrowth, then leaped in a long arc and seized his flanks between its claws, dragging him to earth as though it were a tabby, he a luckless rat.

Then began a dreadful parody of cat-and-mouse play. The werewolf trailed a broken leg behind him, for the panther's mighty jaws had crushed his bones at its first onset, and at each fresh capture the black leopard gave him further hurt, now raking him from huckle-bone to rump, now clawing him across the shoulders, now wallowing him upon the frozen ground and slapping at him soft-dawed till the breath was almost beaten from his body. Then it would crouch, its tail atwitch, and watch him with inscrutable green eyes as he limped off to seek the shelter of a thicket, only to leap and drag him back each time he almost readied asylum.

It seemed a metamorphosis was working in the werewolf. When first the panther's torturing play began he was as much in form a wolf as any natural beast, but as cruel claws and ruthless fangs ripped quivering flesh from his tormented bones he seemed to take on semi-human shape. His paws appeared to lengthen into hands, his shoulders widened and his body straightened, so that while he was still cased in unkempt, matted fur, he was more like a man dight in a hairy garment than a wolf. And from the tortured mask of fur the terror-stricken features of von Wolfberg looked in hopeless fright.