Page:Weird Tales volume 33 number 04.djvu/99

 Her story of strange worship puzzles and repels Lanark and his semi-fanatical sergeant, Jager; yet the lieutenant is attracted by her. A horned image, found in the cellar, is smashed by Jager, and in its hollow middle is discovered a strange, unopenable box. Lanark hides this in a brick oven of the house, just as Mandifer and his son appear and predict dire things to come.

Southern guerrillas attack, and flee again when the house bursts into blue flame. Six of the guerrillas have been killed, also the two Mandifer men; but when a grave is prepared, the two latter bodies have disappeared.

After the war, Lanark returns to the Fearful Rock country. He finds Sergeant Jager working as a frontier preacher, and Enid Mandifer living alone and haunted in her stepfather's house. Later, visiting the rock at night, he learns that the guerrillas' grave is opened. Beside it he meets and fights an enemy who proves to be one of the enemy he himself killed. He discusses the mysterious horror with Jager, and they determine to fight it.

Enid Mandifer, interviewed, remembers something of Persil Mandifer's strange worship, and of a box which he claimed held his "fate and fortune"; it could be opened only at midnight under a full moon — such as will shine that very night.

The story continues:

the cross-hatching of new-leafed branches the full moon shone down from its zenith. Lanark and Enid Mandifer walked gingerly through the night-filled timber in the gulley beyond which, they knew, lay the ruins of the house where so much repellent mystery had been born.

"It's just eleven o'clock," whispered Lanark, looking at his big silver watch. He was dressed in white shirt and dark trousers, without coat, hat or gloves. His revolver rode in the front of his waistband, and as he limped along, the sheath of Jager's old cavalry saber thumped and rasped his left boot-top. "We must be almost there."

"We are there," replied Enid. "Here's the clearing, and the little brook of water."

She was right. They had come to the open space where first they had met. The moonlight made the ground and its new grass pallid, and struck frosty-gold lights from the runlet in the very center of the clearing. Beyond, to the west, lay menacing shadows.

Enid stooped and laid upon the ground the hand-mirror she carried,

"Stand to one side," she said, "and please don't look."

Lanark obeyed, and the girl began to undress.

The young man felt dew at his mustache, and a chill in his heart that was not from dew. He stared into the trees beyond the clearing, trying to have faith in Jager's plan. "We must make the devils come forth and face us," the sergeant-preacher had argued. "Miss Mandifer shall be our decoy, to draw them out where we can get at them. All is very strange, but this much we know — the unholy worship did go on; Miss Mandifer was to be sacrificed as part of it; and, when the sacrifice was not completed, all these evil things happened. We have the hauntings, the blue fire of the house, the creature that attacked Mr. Lanark, and a host of other mysteries to credit to these causes. Let us profit by what little we have found out, and put an