Page:Weird Tales volume 33 number 04.djvu/28

 emerged, and with it came another, and another. The street seemed filled to overflowing with vague shapes, shapes almost without outline or faces, only eyes.

She could not know—her terror would not let her realize—that they were men enveloped in long cloaks and muffled to the eyes. They seemed a cloud of horror-shapes more dreadful than the loup-garou of Norman forests with which her nurse had frightened her so long ago at Aules.

Fright mounted to sheer panic, and panic gave way to a paralyzing horror as the limping, dragging step came nearer, scuffed and shuffled to a halt, and paused beside her.

"Ha, you have her? A merveille!" The voice was low and harsh and raucous as the tearing of a sheet of paper, but she recognized it. Macrin Henriot!

And now the blind was snapped from a dark-lantern, and the beam shone in her face, dazzling her with its quick brightness—but not in time. Before her dazed eyes ceased to function she beheld him peering at her through the gloom, leering like a fiend that comes to snatch a forfeit soul to hell.

Macrin Henriot, playmate of her childhood, discredited notary's apprentice, farrier in her father's stables, agent of the police of the Terror—but how changed! His dark, handsome, morose face was twisted almost out of semblance to a human countenance; one eye was closed until it was the merest slit; a corner of the mouth sagged down until it set his lips in a perpetual twisted, sneering grin, exposing teeth and drooling spittle; the whole side of his face seemed to have slipped, as though it had been dough that sloughed to shapelessness with its own weight. It overflowed the line of his jawbone, hanging down with a hound's dewlap. And as the face was, so the body was deformed. One shoulder thrust grotesquely up, as if his spine were permanently twisted in a corkscrew bend; the arm was bent at an unnatural angle and the hand was rigid, splay-boned, as unlike a human hand as if it were the gnarled root of a dead tree. One leg was stiffened at the knee as if bound fast in splints; the foot was twisted at the ankle till it turned in almost at a right angle.

This was the reason for the halting, dragging, shuffling limp, the dreadful dot-and-carry-one with which he walked. Paralysis! She had seen a peasant on her father's farm deformed in such a way when a horse had kicked him on the head. The blow from Mordecai's lead-loaded bludgeon

He was speaking, slowly, painfully, with a sort of slobbering lisp. His eyes were dilated and bright with hate, his twisted mouth fell open and clapped shut as if he had no mastery of it, his deformed hand was fumbling like a fish that dies upon the angler's string, he slobbered like a mad dog with each word he uttered. But she could understand him. All too well!

"Bon soir, Mademoiselle la Comtesse. I have long anticipated this meeting. This time it is the chopper, with no choice between it and the poor cripple, Macrin Henriot. It was a merry chase you led us with your masquerade of being Madame Voestone, but at last we have you in the net, my pretty little pigeon. This time we shall not suffer interruption by Monsieur l'Américain. I have seen to that!"

A great lump, hot as molten lead, was forming in Susette's throat; there was a ringing in her ears that shut out every other sound. Her heart seemed smashed to fragments and each separate, aching piece was being torn out by