LITMIR.BIZ

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my night-nurse, Edith Paxon, was wandering around and caught you; I don’t know. But I do know you killed her, took her into the surgery and drained her blood into a container.”

      “I—I wanted to bring Eula back to life,” the man choked.

      “Yes. I realized that when I saw her corpse in your cabin, with bowls of blood on the table and blood streaming down out of her mouth. You’d been trying to force it down her poor dead throat, hadn’t you?”

      “She…she wouldn’t drink. I tried to make her, but she…she jest wouldn’t. Then I thought it was because the blood was cold, mebbe. So I went out to try an’ git some that was warmer… ”

      Croft nodded. “Yes. And you heard Miss Lemoyne screaming up here in this cave. So you came to investigate, carrying a red lantern you must have stolen from some road project.” He sighed as he turned to the Ludwells. “You men can understand the rest of it, I guess. And—well, I won’t hold it against you for knocking me out and kidnapping my sweetheart. You were on the wrong track, but your trap worked.”

      “Reckon mebbe we-uns been wrong about you, too, doc,” Lige Ludwell said. “Me an’ the boys air willin’ to be right friendly-like with you from now on, if hit suits you.”

      Croft stuck out his hand. And then Jeb Starko, with a sudden burst of strength, broke away from his clansmen captors. “I’m a-goin’ back to Eula!” he cried as he raced for the mouth of the cavern. But just as he reached the brink, he lost his footing. Screaming, he plunged downward; there came a crashing thud as his body impacted against the valley floor, far below. Then silence, save for the requiem of the rain and the wind’s sighing dirge.…

      * * * *

      They buried Jeb Starko and his wife in a single grave, the next day. Returning from the simple funeral, Tim Croft held Brenda Lemoyne very close to him. “Love’s a queer thing, isn’t it, my sweet?” he whispered.

      “It’s a very wonderful thing,” she answered, and held up her lips for his kiss.

      MISTRESS OF SNARLING DEATH, by Paul Chadwick

      Stephen Demerest stopped when he saw the figure coming toward him across the desolate, rain-drenched fields. It was his first glimpse of a human being since his car had mired in the thick mud of the country road.

      He was on foot now, lost in a dreary region of deserted farms and rocky fields, from which all fertility seemed to have been pressed by the weight of ages. Even the spring rain had brought no life back to the barren, eroded earth.

      He waited beside the rough path he’d followed. The figure was only a dimly moving shape in the dusk, at first. Then, it materialized into a human form enveloped in some sort of dark cloak, with a stiff, wide-brimmed hat standing out queerly from the head, reminding him of a fantastic figure out of the mists of antique Spanish legend. But this was New England he was in, not ancient Spain, and the approaching figure was incongruous.

      Then Stephen Demerest started. For the lowering sunset clouds broke apart a little. A sulphurous glow came through them, touching the wet landscape with a weird, sickly saffron light. And he saw that the person coming toward him was a woman.

      She moved with stately grace. There was something so odd about her presence in this lonely spot, something so arresting in her costume, that Demerest stared in growing wonder.

      She got closer. He saw that she was youthful, hardly more than a girl. A girl with pale, impassive features, beautifully molded, and great dark eyes that were strangely fixed upon him.

      He stood speechless, breathless. She was directly opposite before he pulled himself out of his trance sufficiently to speak. “Can you tell me,” he said, “if I’m anywhere near the Benjamin Halliday house?”

      Her eyes remained fixed upon him, but she didn’t answer. Demerest hurriedly explained: “My car got stuck in the mud. I had to leave it. I thought I was taking a short-cut across country to the Halliday house, but apparently I’m lost.”

      Still she was silent, her oval, cameo-clear face unchanging in its expression, her dark, unfathomable eyes staring at him as though he were something less than human.

      Demerest, wet, cold, weary and annoyed, stepped quickly toward her—and at once stopped with a stifled gasp. For a sound reached him that he hadn’t heard before—the soft, rustling patter of many feet. He saw suddenly that the girl wasn’t alone.

      Behind her, their shaggy bodies almost invisible against the dark ground, six great black dogs padded two abreast in somber escort. Their huge muzzles hung close to the earth. They rolled their eyes upward, until a dozen points of sinister, greenish fire glared at Demerest. He stood transfixed, spellbound, feeling his spine crawl with horror.

      Yet they were only dogs after all, he reasoned, and this girl constituted his one hope of finding his way out of the wilderness before night came.

      He took another step toward her. The dogs, as though obeying a quick, unspoken command, broke their strange formation and suddenly ringed him, the giant leaders slinking around to his back, the others stationing themselves one on each side and two in front. They stood stiff-legged, fangs bared, the fur on their necks lifting up in savage hackles.

      Demerest felt a moment of instinctive, cringing dread. He wasn’t a coward. But his good sense told him that he stood in the presence of violent death. In a concerted attack these dogs would rip out his throat, literally tear him to pieces.

      The girl stopped, too. Tall, imperious, and lovely in spite of her grotesque garb, she regarded him searchingly for many seconds, her great, dark eyes lingering on his face. Then her lips moved. She made a clucking sound to the dogs.

      They fell out of their ring formation as quickly as they had assumed it, and slunk behind her again, following with silent obedience as she moved away.

      Demerest stood weak and trembling, a light sweat beading his forehead, as the weird cavalcade passed on. The dogs appeared to vanish almost at once, their great shapes blending with the darkness of the ground.

      For a full minute he watched the girl move off, and got a suggestion of the lithe loveliness of her figure beneath her cloak, the exquisite grace of her carriage. He stared until her imperious shoulders blurred and disappeared in the gathering dusk.

      Then, resolutely, he turned and followed. She had refused to speak to him. Her dogs had menaced his life. She’d treated him as something to be ignored or scorned. But there must, he reasoned, be some human habitation in the direction she had taken.

      * * * *

      Darkness came. The sulphurous glow faded from the west, extinguished by the dying day, and blotted out by the low-seeping rain clouds that were gathering again. A wind whimpered across the soggy fields like a tortured spirit. Demerest strayed from the path several times.

      He bumped into jagged rocks, scratched himself on ground-clinging bushes. At the end of half an hour it was pitch-black. His small flashlight, with its battery nearly exhausted and its bulb already weakly red, shed hardly enough illumination for him to see a yard ahead. Finally he caught sight of a wan glimmer in the darkness.

      He moved toward it, seeing in imagination the shapes of the great black dogs creeping close. The glimmer became an old-fashioned porch lantern swinging above the door of a massive stone house.

      Demerest stooped and groped for a stick. If the black beasts served as watch dogs for this mansion, they might attack him.

      He got closer, stared at the imposing front of the building, and realized that this must be the Halliday place. A sudden sense of the strangeness of his mission came to him. It was deeper, more eerie than when he’d received the letter in his pocket, every word of which he remembered clearly. It read:

      Dear Stephen:

      You probably have forgotten me, but your dear father and I were very close friends. And now, because I’m in desperate trouble, I’m turning to you, his son.

      I’ve heard that you’re engaged in radio work. Please come to my

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