LITMIR.BIZ

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upright in a chair before a plain deal table. There were bowls before her; bowls containing thick red fluid that couldn’t be anything else but blood. She was staring at the window, her eyes glassy and expressionless—and crimson streaks drooled from her mouth, down her chin, onto her breast.

      Then, from somewhere up on the mountainside, there came a thin, wailing scream—a woman’s scream, terror-spawned and hideous, as if ripped from the throat of a girl whose reason topples close to the brink of horrified insanity!

      “Brenda!” Tim Croft choked. He turned and hurled himself back along the path, seeking the source of that keening sound.

      As he ran, he heard it again; it seemed closer, this time. To his right he noticed a faint flicker of yellow light that seemed to glow from the mountain itself. He knew there were no cabins perched in that direction; the terrain was too steep, too inaccessible, for human habitation. Yet the light was real, and the scream was repeated again. “Tim—Tim—Help me—!” It died out abruptly, as if muffled by throttling fingers.

      Tim Croft scrambled off the trail and started clawing his way toward the light, grasping at boulders and scrub oak to keep himself from falling into the hollow. Once a rock went out from under his foot, almost pitching him headlong to the creek-bed that brawled and seethed far below him. But he regained his footing and pressed onward with a madman’s singleness of purpose; and at long last he came to the seeping light.

      HE saw, then, that it emanated from the mouth of a cave that burrowed worm-like into the mountain’s dank bowels. Within the cave, lanterns gleamed and men muttered quietly to drown the sobbing moans of their feminine prisoner. Tim Croft crouched low as he crept toward the sounds. Then a frantic fury gripped him, and his nails dug blood from his palms. “Brenda—!” he shouted.

      She hung suspended by her ankles from an iron spike driven into the cave’s left wall. Her clothing had been torn from her lilting body, leaving her charms exposed to the eyes of four Ludwells who hunkered down behind boulders beyond her. But at least there were no fang-marks on her sweet throat, and she seemed unharmed. Writhing and twisting, she was trying to raise herself in order to reach her fettered ankles. She saw Croft coming. “Tim—oh, thank God!” she moaned.

      But he didn’t reach her. As he sprang, the quartette of clansmen tackled him and threw him heavily to the floor of the cavern. He fought them like a maniac, striking out with fists and elbows and feet; but in the end, they subdued him, tied his wrists and ankles with rope and dragged him back behind their barricade of boulders. “Be quiet, unless you want us to kill ye right here an’ now.”

      “You fools! Let go me! What’s the meaning of this?”

      “We-uns air a-trappin’ the witch-vampire, an’ we’re a-usin’ your gal as bait for the trap, that’s what.”

      “Where’s Lige? He’s the one I’ve got to find! I—”

      “Lige is out a-scoutin’ around. Now will ye shet up, or must we-uns crack your skull with a rock?”

      “God! You men don’t know what you’re doing! If you persist in this thing, Miss Lemoyne’s blood may be on your hands! You’ve got to cut her down, I tell you! A trap isn’t necessary. I know the answer to—”

      They hit him, then. A fist caromed off his jaw, dazed him into silence. Dimly, over the buzzing in his ears, he heard one of them say: “Reckon mebbe we’d better put out them lights. I’ve heerd tell witch-vampires like the dark better.” There came the shuffle of footsteps, and one by one the lanterns were extinguished. Blackness as solid as anthracite settled upon the cave, and a silence broken only by Brenda Lemoyne’s muffled moans.

      A sharp fragment of rock dug into Tim Croft’s ribs, painfully, like the pressure of a blunt knife. He twisted aside, and a plan leaped into his brain. He pressed his bound wrists against the edge of the rock and began sawing the rope back and forth. He knew, now, that it had been the Ludwells who felled him back on the road; who had kidnapped Brenda and brought her here. And he realized Lige Ludwell’s schemes; knew what the consequences would be unless something could be done at once.…

      A frayed strand parted, and then another. He worked with increased vigor, unmindful of the pain that coursed through him when he scraped his flesh against the jagged bit of rock. And then, finally, his fetters gave way. His hands were free. Silently in the darkness he leaned forward to attack the knots at his ankles. He plucked at them until the tips of his fingers were white-hot agony and his nails peeled back from the quick. It was just as he was untying the last loop of rope that he heard someone entering the cave.

      He gathered himself; prepared to leap. A match flared. Lige Ludwell was the newcomer. He was approaching the suspended girl, studying her, leaning toward her pulsating throat and holding the match close to her flesh. Terror slithered into her widened eyes. She screamed out her panic.

      Tim Croft catapulted himself at Ludwell’s broad, bowed back. And as he struck, Ludwell’s match went out. The burly mountaineer squirmed around, tried to lock his thick fingers about Croft’s gullet. Croft sensed the attempt, eluded it and smashed both knotted fists home to the bearded man’s mouth. Lige Ludwell moaned and went limp, with Croft panting over him. Over behind the boulders, the other four clansmen were scrambling out to help their leader. One of them swore as he searched for a lantern.

      “Quiet, you fools!” Tim Croft whispered harshly through the blackness. “Your trap is about to work. That’s why I hit Lige; to keep him from giving us away. Down, all of you—unless you want to scare off your witch-vampire!”

      There was a slithering sound at the mouth of the cave, and suddenly a hellish crimson effulgence glowed there like devil’s fire. Through the dim ruby light a shape scuttled forward, and something clattered metallically. Brenda shrieked again. “Tim—it’s got me—it’s at my throat—”

      He surged toward her, and his hard arms closed about a jerkily-writhing form. “You’re all through killing girls for their blood, Jeb Starko!” he said as he bore the scrawny mountaineer to the cavern floor and pinned him there. “Make another light, you Ludwells. Starko’s red lantern gives me the creeps!”

      The clansmen came out of hiding, struck matches. Kerosene wicks flickered as flame was applied to them. Lige Ludwell swayed to his feet, staring stupidly. “You—you mean to say it was Jeb Starko that done all the killin’?”

      Tim Croft nodded. “Hold him while I cut Miss Lemoyne down.” They obeyed willingly, and Croft slashed at Brenda’s bonds with a borrowed blade. He stood her upright, peeled off his bathrobe, wrapped it around her and held her in his embrace. “It’s all over, darling,” he whispered. “There’ll be no more talk of vampirism in Haunted Hollow.”

      Pinioned and helpless, Jeb Starko sobbed: “There never was no witch-vampires, damn ye all! You got no right to say—”

      Croft cast a pitying glance at the prisoner. “You’re right, Jeb. There weren’t any witch-vampires; there was only you, and your ignorance of medical methods. I had told you that your wife was suffering from nephrosis, a disease where the blood rejects proteins and refuses to transmit water to the kidneys. The only way to treat it is by transfusion—putting borrowed blood into the patient’s veins.

      “You knew we were keeping Eula alive by giving her new blood, refrigerated and shipped here from the county hospital blood bank. In spite of that, she kept getting worse. You conceived the idea that the reason she wasn’t improving was because we weren’t giving her enough fresh blood. You decided to do something about it.

      “You caught Lige Ludwell’s daughter in the woods, killed her, drained her veins into a tin bucket. You didn’t know anything about transfusion methods; you thought the fluid was fed to your wife by mouth. You were going to bring the Ludwell girl’s blood to the hospital for Eula—until you learned that the Ludwells had discovered the murder and jumped to a wrong conclusion.

      “That scared you. You knew the Ludwells thought Eula was a vampire. So you came to the hospital to warn me. Then I told you your wife had died. You went almost crazy with grief. While I was palavering with the Ludwells

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