The Best Horror Stories of

The Best Horror Stories of

Robert E Howard

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Previous publication information for the stories contained in this work Illustrations

Foreword

Introduction

In the Forest of Villefere

A Song of the Werewolf Folk

Wolfshead

Up, John Kane!

Remembrance

The Dream Snake

Sea Curse

The Moor Ghost

Moon Mockery

The Little People

Dead Man's Hate

The Tavern

Rattle of Bones

The Fear That Follows

The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux

Casonetto's Last Song

The Touch of Death

Out of the Deep

A Legend of Faring Town

RestlessWaters

The Shadow of the Beast

The Dead Slaver's Tale

Dermod's Bane

The Hills of the Dead

Dig Me No Grave

The Song of a Mad Minstrel

The Children of the Night

Musings

The Black Stone

The Thing on the Roof

The Dweller in Dark Valley

The Horror from the Mound

A Dull Sound as of Knocking

People of the Dark

Delenda Est

The Cairn on the Headland

Worms of the Earth

The Symbol

The Valley of the Lost

The Hoofed Thing

The Noseless Horror

The Dwellers Under the Tomb

An Open Window

The House of Arabu

The Man on the Ground

Old Garfield's Heart

Kelly the Conjure-Man

Black Canaan

To a Woman

One Who Comes at Eventide

The Haunter of the Ring

Pigeons from Hell

The Dead Remember

The Fire of Asshurbanipal

Fragment

Which Will Scarcely Be Understood

Miscellanea

Golnor the Ape

Spectres in the Dark

The House

Untitled Fragment

Appendix

Notes on the Original Howard Texts

Acknowledgments

The Fully Illustrated Robert E. Howard Library from Del Rey Books Copyright

For Karen

Greg Staples

In the Forest of Villefere

first published in Weird Tales, August 1925

A Song of the Werewolf Folk

first published in Etchings and Odysseys, 1987

Wolfshead

first published in Weird Tales, April 1926

Up, John Kane!

first published in Up, John Kane!, 1977

Remembrance

first published in Weird Tales, April 1928

The Dream Snake

first published in Weird Tales, February 1928

Sea Curse

first published in Weird Tales, May 1928

The Moor Ghost

first published in Weird Tales, September 1929

Moon Mockery

first published in Weird Tales, April 1929

The Little People

first published in Coven 13, January 1970

Dead Man's Hate

first published in Weird Tales, January 1930

The Tavern

first published in Singers in the Shadows, 1970

Rattle of Bones

first published in Weird Tales, June 1929

The Fear That Follows

first published in Singers in the Shadows, 1970

The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux

first published in Ghost Stories, April 1929 (as The Apparition in the Prize Ring) Casonetto's Last Song

first published in Etchings and Odysseys, 1973

The Touch of Death

first published in Weird Tales, February 1930 (as The Fearsome Touch of Death) Out of the Deep

first published in Magazine of Horror, November 1967

A Legend of Faring Town

first published in Verses in Ebony, 1975

Restless Waters

first published in Witchcraft & Sorcery, 1974

The Shadow of the Beast

first published in The Shadow of the Beast, 1977

The Dead Slaver's Tale

first published in Weirdbook, 1973

Dermod's Bane

first published in Magazine of Horror, Fall 1967

The Hills of the Dead

first published in Weird Tales, August 1930

Dig Me No Grave

first published in Weird Tales, February 1937

The Song of a Mad Minstrel

first published in Weird Tales, February--March 1931

The Children of the Night

first published in Weird Tales, April--May 1931

Musings

first published in Witchcraft & Sorcery, January--February 1971

The Black Stone

first published in Weird Tales, November 1931

The Thing on the Roof

first published in Weird Tales, February 1932

The Dweller in Dark Valley

first published in Magazine of Horror, November 1965

The Horror from the Mound

first published in Weird Tales, May 1932

A Dull Sound as of Knocking

first published in A Rhyme of Salem Town and Other Poems, 2007

People of the Dark

first published in Strange Tales, June 1932

Delenda Est

first published in Worlds of Fantasy, 1968

The Cairn on the Headland

first published in S trange Tales, January 1933

Worms of the Earth

first published in Weird Tales, November 1932

The Symbol

first appeared in Ariel, Autumn 1976

The Valley of the Lost

first published in Startling Mystery Stories, Spring 1967 (as The Secret of Lost Valley) The Hoofed Thing

first published in Weirdbook Three, 1970 (as Usurp the Night) The Noseless Horror

first published in Magazine of Horror, February 1970

The Dwellers Under the Tomb

first published in Lost Fantasies, 1976

An Open Window

first published in Weird Tales, September 1932

The House of Arabu

first published in Avon Fantasy Reader, 1952 (as The Witch from Hell's Kitchen) The Man on the Ground

first published in Weird Tales, July 1933

Old Garfield's Heart

first published in Weird Tales, December 1933

Kelly the Conjure-Man

first published in The Howard Collector, Summer 1964

Black Canaan

first published in Weird Tales, June 1936

To a Woman

first published in Modern American Poetry, 1933

One Who Comes at Eventide

first published in Modern American Poetry, 1933

The Haunter of the Ring

first published in Weird Tales, June 1934

Pigeons from Hell

first published in Weird Tales, May 1938

The Dead Remember

first published in Argosy, August 15, 1936

The Fire of Asshurbanipal

first published in Weird Tales, December 1936

Fragment

first published in Weird Tales, December 1937

Which Will Scarcely Be Understood

first published in Weird Tales, October 1937

Golnor the Ape

first published in Crypt of Cthulhu, Roodmas 1985

Spectres in the Dark

first published in Cromlech, Spring 1985

The House

first published in The New Howard Reader, 2003

Untitled Fragment

first published in The Howard Collector, Spring 1967

Illustrations

Like a shadow it moved upon de Montour

"Sea fiend," I said in an unsteady voice

He halted, frozen

And about clustered the--Things

The sky was overcast with misty gray

He parried the bird-thing's stroke

Yar Ali fired point-blank from the hip with deadly effect

Foreword

I have been a professional illustrator for nearly twenty years and was inspired, like many artists, by the work of Frank Frazetta. I first saw his Conan paintings when I was eight years old, and I can still remember where I stood and what the furniture in my neighbor's house looked like at the time--and twenty years later, Howard's writing still has the same effect. Howard is a master of atmosphere and detail, and when I read his stories, I am in them; I can see the buttons on the costumes, smell the dank air, and feel the foreboding. So, although illustrating his work has been a dream project, it has not been an easy one! For doing such a master justice is no small task--but, nevertheless, it's incredibly rewarding.

To follow in the footsteps of the mighty Frazetta is one thing, but to follow in Howard's is quite another.

I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed illustrating it.

Greg Staples

2008

Introduction

He was almost alone in his ability to create real emotions of fear and of dread suspense.... For stark, living fear...the actual smell and feel and darkness and brooding horror and impending doom that inhere in that nighted, moss-hung jungle...what other writer is even in the running with REH?

--H. P. LOVECRAFT

In 1923 a new magazine appeared on the newsstands of America, proclaiming itself "The Unique Magazine": Weird Tales. It was intended by its publishers to be a market for the sort of "off-trail" stories that other magazines would not publish, but while it did become the first professional magazine to publish H. P. Lovecraft, its first editor showed perhaps too great a fondness for traditional ghost stories.

Following a shaky first year, though, a new editor, Farnsworth Wright, took the reins, adding to the masthead "A Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual." He would quickly make good on that claim, and among his first accomplishments was acceptance, in the fall of 1924, of a story of prehistoric adventure by an eighteen-year-old Texan named Robert E. Howard.

Howard and Weird Tales would remain closely associated for the next dozen years, until the author took his own life at the age of thirty. During that period, forty-eight stories and twenty-one poems by Robert E. Howard appeared in the magazine, and he became one of its most popular writers, along with Lovecraft and Seabury Quinn. His fame rests largely on the fantasy adventures of Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and Turlogh O'Brien, stories in which he created a new subgenre that has come to be known as sword and sorcery, blending together elements of heroic adventure and horror. As the stories in this volume will demonstrate, he was also a master of horror, who brought to it a strong dash of adventure.

Though a great admirer of the "cosmic horror" of Lovecraft and the imaginative sweep of Clark Ashton Smith, Howard was by nature an adventure writer, and his concerns were human, not cosmic. "It is the individual mainly which draws me--the struggling, blundering, passionate insect vainly striving against the river of Life and seeking to divert the channel of events to suit himself--breaking his fangs on the iron collar of Fate and sinking into final defeat with the froth of a curse on his lips," he wrote to Lovecraft.

Where Lovecraft's characters frequently are driven to madness by what they have seen, Howard's will more frequently be provoked into action. Howard's characters, as a general rule, refuse to give up or to run away, no matter how heavily the odds are stacked against them. Howard also brings to his work a gift of poetry, a talent for creating moody or atmospheric effects with just a few broad strokes, and a strong emotionalism that heightens the dramatic effects.

As with many naturally gifted storytellers, Howard's earliest works are marked by a creative exuberance that is sometimes only barely under control. "Wolfshead," for example, demonstrates that the young writer is not afraid to play with conventions of the horror genre, in this case the werewolf. On the other hand, the author recognized that he had perhaps gotten carried away with himself, writing to a friend,

"After reading it, I'm not altogether sure I wasn't off my noodler when I wrote it. I sure mixed slavers, duelists, harlots, drunkards, maniacs and cannibals reckless. The narrator is a libertine and a Middle Ages fop; the leading lady is a harlot, the hero is a lunatic, one of the main characters is a slave trader, one a pervert, one a drunkard, no they're all drunkards, but one is a gambler, one a duelist and one a cannibal slave."

Farnsworth Wright, however, thought well enough of the tale not only to buy it, but to make it the cover story for the April 1926 issue, and therein is an interesting story itself. In January of that year, Wright wrote to Howard asking if he had a carbon copy of the story: the artist assigned to provide the cover painting and interior pen-and-ink illustration had not returned the manuscript, and there was no time to lose in typesetting if the story was to make it into the April issue. Howard, at this stage in his career, had not developed the habit of making carbon copies. So the young writer sat down, rewrote the story from memory, and sent it off. Shortly thereafter he learned that the manuscript had been found, missing the first page, which was taken from his rewrite.

Howard's elation at making an extra ten dollars for his efforts (on top of the forty dollars he'd already been promised) was short-lived. As he later told a correspondent, he "one day got the advance pages of Wolfshead which was about to be published. Reading it over I was so depressed and discouraged that I went and got a job jerking soda in a drug-store."

Readers reacted to the story much more positively than the author. While it was not voted the most popular tale in the April issue (Lovecraft's "The Outsider" won that honor), it placed a very respectable third. Years later, writing about Howard to E. Hoffmann Price, Lovecraft said, "I first became conscious of him as a coming leader just a decade ago--when I read Wolfshead. ...I saw that WT had landed a big-timer."

Most young writers are, of course, inclined to emulate other writers whom they admire or respect, and Howard was no exception. Sometimes the influences are quite apparent, as in "The Little People," based on the work of Welsh master Arthur Machen (who is mentioned in Howard's tale, along with his story

"The Shining Pyramid"), a prelude to what will become an important motif in some of Howard's finest stories ("The Children of the Night," "People of the Dark," "Worms of the Earth," "The Valley of the Lost," etc.). Less explicit are influences like Ambrose Bierce (whose "A Watcher by the Dead" must surely have inspired "The Touch of Death") and Jack London (if indeed the Faring Town tales may be said to owe something to Howard's favorite writer). Undoubtedly Howard was occasionally influenced by something he'd read in the magazines. Sometimes stories came from his own dreams (as he claimed was the case with "The Dream Snake").

Yet Howard is never entirely derivative. Always there is something in his work that marks it as his. As Lovecraft would later recognize, "Seldom if ever did he set down a lifeless stock character or situation and leave it as such. Before he concluded with it, it always took on some tinge of vitality and reality...always drew something from his own experience and knowledge of life instead of from the sterile herbarium of dessicated pulpish standbys." As with his werewolves, other Howard creations do not seem to follow traditional guidelines: the merman of "Out of the Deep" seems not so much a creature of the sea as an embodiment of the cold, cruel sea itself; his ghosts take varied forms in such tales as "The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux" and "The Shadow of the Beast." The Tavern of the poem is "like a monster"--no mere building, but a sinister life form. To my mind, though, his most effective accomplishment is the way he can make fear, or guilt, or hate, or other intense psychological states assume almost tangible form. Howard was a very emotional writer, and it adds a heightened sense of urgency to his tales and poems. "The Touch of Death," "The Fear that Follows," and "The Dead Slavers' Tale" are but three examples--almost all the stories herein will illustrate the point as well.

In the fall of 1927 Howard wrote a story about an Elizabethan-era swordsman who pursues a trail of vengeance into Darkest Africa, where he meets with sorcery and witnesses a bestial retribution. He'd intended to send it to Weird Tales, still at that time the only magazine that had accepted any of his stories. However, on a whim he sent it to Argosy, one of the better pulp magazines, instead, and was rewarded with a personal letter from an associate editor who, while rejecting it, said "You seem to have caught the knack of writing good action & plenty of it into your stories." Considerably buoyed, Howard wrote to his friend Clyde Smith, "So, if a despised weird tale, whose whole minor tone is occultism, can create that much interest with a magazine which never publishes straight weird stuff, I don't feel so much discouraged." He sent the story without modification to Weird Tales, which published it in the August 1928 issue as "Red Shadows," the first of Howard's tales of the swashbuckling Puritan Solomon Kane, and the first of his many successful heroic fantasy series.

All of Howard's sword-and-sorcery stories include elements of horror, but the Kane series in particular is every bit as much horror as it is adventure. Some of these are set in England or Continental Europe: we have selected here "Rattle of Bones," in which a chance encounter in the Black Forest leads Kane to a confrontation with evil in a lonely tavern. Others are set in Darkest Africa, that fictional continent so beloved of the adventure writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a mysterious land of jungles teeming with life inimical to man, of strange peoples and cults, bizarre flora and fauna, a land largely unexplored, in which might lie lost cities or civilizations from remotest antiquity. Howard certainly was not the first, nor the last, writer to make use of the possibilities of Darkest Africa, but as Lovecraft said, he brought to "the shadow-haunted ruins of unknown and primordial cities in the African jungle...an aura of pre-human fear and necromancy which no other writer could duplicate." In "Hills of the Dead,"

Kane enlists the aid of his blood brother, the shaman N'Longa (and what is a God-fearing Puritan doing with a shaman blood brother, anyway?), in combatting an ancient race of walking dead. Again we find Howard challenging the traditions: What are these creatures? Kane calls them vampires, but they are not the blood drinkers of Dracula and its imitators. There is a host of them swarming the hills, and Kane finds he must fight demons with demonry.

In 1930, Howard and Lovecraft at last began that correspondence that has come to be recognized as perhaps the greatest in fantasy circles. The two discussed and debated myriad topics, and inevitably the ideas found their way into each author's work. Howard perhaps shows the influences more directly and openly, at least at first. The early stages of the epistolary friendship inspired the younger writer to experiment with stories in the Lovecraftian vein, producing "The Children of the Night," "The Black Stone" (thought by many to be the finest Cthulhu Mythos story not written by Lovecraft), "The Thing on the Roof," and the last of his Solomon Kane stories, "The Footsteps Within," within a matter of months.

Because Howard was--consciously or unconsciously--emulating the Lovecraft style, and making use of terms or concepts from Lovecraft, these stories are frequently thought of as belonging to the Cthulhu Mythos. A word about this is in order.

The Cthulhu Mythos refers to a sort of pseudomythology that originated in the work of Lovecraft, many of whose stories are loosely linked by being set in a fictional New England (with the towns of Arkham, Kingsport, Dunwich, and Innsmouth, among others), and by their references to various cosmic entities that are entirely indifferent to man but nevertheless are worshipped as gods by some cultists (Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlethotep, etc.). Lovecraft inserted glancing references to these entities in some of the work he revised for other authors, like Adolphe de Castro and Zelia Bishop, and a few people noticed, including Robert E. Howard. In one of his early letters to Lovecraft, Howard inquired about these entities:

"I have noted in your stories you refer to Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, R'lyeh, Yuggoth etc. Adolph de Castro, I note, mentions these gods, places, or whatever they are, only the spelling is different, as Cthulutl, Yog Sototl. Both you and he, I believe, have used the phrase fhtaghn.... Would it be asking too-much to ask you to tell me the significance of the above mentioned names or terms? And the Arab Alhazred, and the Necronomicon. The mention of these things in your superb stories have whetted my interest immensely. I would extremely appreciate any information you would give me regarding them."

Lovecraft was quick to disabuse Howard of the idea that there was some body of esoteric lore that his scholarship had missed:

"Regarding the solemnly cited myth-cycle of Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, R'lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Nug, Yeb, Shub-Niggurath, etc., etc.--let me confess that this is all a synthetic concoction of my own, like the populous and varied pantheon of Lord Dunsany's "Pagana." The reason for its echoes in Dr. de Castro's work is that the latter gentleman is a revision-client of mine--into whose tales I have stuck these glancing references for sheer fun. If any other clients of mine get work placed in W.T., you will perhaps find a still-wider spread of the cult of Azathoth, Cthulhu, and the Great Old Ones! The Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred is likewise something which must yet be written in order to possess objective reality.... Long has alluded to the Necronomicon in some things of his--in fact, I think it is rather good fun to have this artificial mythology given an air of verisimilitude by wide citation." Lovecraft mentioned that Clark Ashton Smith was beginning a similar pseudomythology involving "the furry toad-god Tsathoggua," and suggested that he might incorporate Howard's Kathulos (from "Skull-Face") into some future tale.

Howard was not long in joining the fun. Within two months of receiving Lovecraft's reply, he had submitted "The Children of the Night" and it had been accepted by Weird Tales. In it he had referred to Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" as one of the three "master horror-tales" (the others being Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Machen's The Novel of the Black Seal) and had made his own first contribution to the Mythos, in the form of the German scholar Von Junzt and his forbidden tome, Nameless Cults. He would soon make other contributions, such as the mad poet Justin Geoffrey and the alien entity Gol-goroth. Other of his creations, such as the serpent men of Valusia (from the Kull series), Bran Mak Morn, and, indeed, Kathulos, would be adopted by Lovecraft and others in their own tales.

But we must draw an important distinction here between the use of these names or concepts as "general background-material" (in Lovecraft's words), as opposed to their being the central conceit or plot driver of a story. As David Schultz and others have noted, neither Lovecraft nor his friends made any effort to codify any of this, seeing it more as something fun, something to give a flavor of real myth and legend to the background of their stories, than as a serious attempt to create a mythos. (Lovecraft himself used the tongue-in-cheek term "Yog-Sothothery"). Thus, Howard may occasionally refer to one of Lovecraft's cosmic entities or allude to the Necronomicon or R'lyeh, but these mentions are usually incidental to the actual story. While it is fun to play the Mythos game, it should not lead the reader to assume that Howard (or others of Lovecraft's peers) were consciously attempting to write Mythos stories.

One story, for example, in which glancing Mythos references are found, but which is wholly a Robert E.

Howard story, is "Worms of the Earth," featuring another of Howard's great heroic fantasy characters, the Pictish king Bran Mak Morn: last in a line of kings stretching back into mankind's dawn, born to lead a savage, degenerated people in a last-ditch effort to prevent the legions of Roman Britain from overrunning their northern homeland, knowing that the fight will ultimately be lost but refusing to surrender. The "hideous and compelling power" that Lovecraft found in the story does not come from monsters or a sense of cosmic despair: it comes from watching the terrible consequences that flow from an all-too-human paroxysm of anger and desire for revenge. The story is considered by many Howard fans and scholars to be his finest tale; it works not only as an extraordinary heroic fantasy, but as a grim and atmospheric work of horror, and is perhaps his most effective use of the "little people" motif.

Howard's letters to Lovecraft frequently included tales of the old West, or of current conditions and events in Texas, and Lovecraft, himself an ardent regionalist (most of his stories being set in a fictional New England), encouraged Howard to make greater use of his native Southwest and its traditions in his fiction. This encouragement eventually prodded him into the creation of several of his finest and most distinctive works of horror or the supernatural, with tales set in the Southwest or in the "piney woods" of the Texas-Arkansas borderlands.

The first of these "regional" works to appear in print was "The Horror from the Mound," set in West Texas and featuring a young cowpuncher who laments his decision to give up his life as a cowboy to buy a farm. The story reflects two threads from Howard's letters to Lovecraft: his considerable sympathy for farmers, who were struggling mightily as the Depression began to settle over the land; and his interest in the legends of lost Spanish treasures, which have been popular in Texas since before the Spanish left.

Most important, of course, Howard shows he is still interested in taking on tropes of the horror genre--here, the vampire again--and giving them an unusual treatment. Too unusual for one poor Weird Tales reader, who complained that "The Horror from the Mound" [contained] no less than four flagrant breaches of accepted vampire tradition." As we have seen, Howard was no respecter of literary traditions. In fact, it might be said that, with this story, Howard had finally succeeded in bringing together all three of his favorite genres--western, adventure, and the weird--to create the first "weird western."

Following "The Horror from the Mound," Howard turned increasingly to his native environs for other tales of horror and the supernatural. "The Valley of the Lost" makes use of the theme of little people, essentially transferring elements of "The Children of the Night" and "Worms of the Earth" to the Southwest and giving the story an ending we might more expect of Lovecraft than of Howard. "The Man on the Ground" is a very short tale but a gripping meditation on the power of hate, a crystallization of all Howard had learned in his study of Texas feuds. It is a fine example of that ability we noted earlier to lend almost tangible form to an abstract emotion. "Old Garfield's Heart," in which early Texas Indian fights and legends play a prominent part, is about as close to home as Howard gets in a story: Lost Knob is his fictional counterpart to his hometown of Cross Plains. The dark magic of "The Dead Remember" is all the darker when set against the authentic backdrop of a cattle drive. These stories, along with his increasingly confident handling of westerns, convinced Lovecraft that "in time he would have made his mark...with some folk-epic of his beloved southwest."

The story generally considered Howard's finest horror tale, though, was not set in the Southwest, but in the South. Texas straddles both geographic regions, and Howard explained to Lovecraft that a dividing line ran between Dallas, which was in East Texas and looked to the south, and Fort Worth, which was, as its slogan goes, "Where the West Begins." Bagwell, where the Howards lived when Robert was about eight years old, is east of Dallas, on the fringes of the Piney Woods area that takes in parts of southwestern Arkansas, northwestern Louisiana, and East Texas. And it is in Bagwell that we find the genesis of "Pigeons from Hell."

"I well remember the tales I listened to and shivered at, when a child in the 'piney woods' of East Texas, where Red River marks the Arkansaw and Texas boundaries," Howard wrote to Lovecraft (using the phonetic spelling for his father's native state). "There were quite a number of old slave darkies still living then. The one to whom I listened most was the cook, old Aunt Mary Bohannon.... Another tale she told that I have often met with in negro-lore. The setting, time and circumstances are changed by telling, but the tale remains basically the same. Two or three men--usually negroes--are travelling in a wagon through some isolated district--usually a broad, deserted river-bottom. They come on to the ruins of a once thriving plantation at dusk, and decide to spend the night in the deserted plantation house. This house is always huge, brooding and forbidding, and always, as the men approach the high columned verandah, through the high weeds that surround the house, great numbers of pigeons rise from their roosting places on the railing and fly away. The men sleep in the big front-room with its crumbling fire-place, and in the night they are awakened by a jangling of chains, weird noises and groans from upstairs. Sometimes footsteps descend the stairs with no visible cause. Then a terrible apparition appears to the men who flee in terror. This monster, in all the tales I have heard, is invariably a headless giant, naked or clad in shapeless sort of garment, and is sometimes armed with a broad-axe. This motif appears over and over in negro-lore."

Just how familiar Howard might have been with "negro-lore" must remain a matter of some conjecture (he lived most of his life, other than that short period in Bagwell and a few weeks in New Orleans, in communities in which there were few, if any, African Americans), but certainly he used what he did know to good effect. Critical consensus seems to concur with Stephen King's remark that "Pigeons from Hell"

is "one of the finest horror stories of [the twentieth] century." It was later adapted for television's Thriller! , an anthology series hosted by Boris Karloff, and is widely regarded as the best episode of that series, "one of the most truly frightening journeys into small-screen fantasy."

"Pigeons from Hell" and other of the piney woods stories (such as "The Shadow of the Beast" and

"Black Canaan") contain some language and attitudes that many readers will find uncomfortable or offensive. Not to put too fine a point on it, Howard was a product of his time and place, the early-twentieth-century South and Southwest, and casually racist attitudes went along with it. In addition, he was writing for the pulp magazines, and stereotyping of ethnic groups served as a kind of shorthand for the writers and readers of this form of popular fiction: Asians, Native Americans, Latins, Irish, Swedes, Eastern Europeans, and others are frequently not treated any better in pulp stories than blacks, whether African or African American, are. But in "Pigeons from Hell," "Black Canaan," "The Dead Remember," and other tales, Howard also displays his considerable gifts for narrative and invention, and his extraordinary talent for creating that atmosphere of "fear and dread suspense" that Lovecraft noted; and I believe that a closer look at the stories reveals considerable sympathy with the downtrodden.

In "The Dead Remember," for instance, it is clear that Howard's sympathies lie with Joel and Jezebel, rather than with the cowboy who murders them in a drunken rage, and in "Pigeons from Hell," it seems equally clear that his sympathies lie with the "mulatto" maid Joan and not with her white tormentor, Celia Blassenville. Howard's own extreme sensitivity to authority ("Life's not worth living if somebody thinks he's in authority over you," he told one correspondent) may have been at the root of his discomfort with mistreatment of slaves ("Thank God the slaves on my ancestors' plantations were never so misused"), and this, along with pride in his Southern heritage, may be why he chose to make the Blassenvilles Creoles from the West Indies rather than Southerners. In "Black Canaan," it is true that the villains are Saul Stark, the conjure man, and his "quadroon" accomplice, the Bride of Damballah, but here I believe Howard's sympathies lie as much with the swamp blacks, over whom Stark holds sway not so much by holding out the promise of liberation as through fear of being "put in the swamp," as with the white inhabitants of the town. In fact, when he names the white town Grimesville, the black settlement Goshen, and the region in which both are found Canaan, I think he may be subtly--perhaps unconsciously--displaying his sympathies with the oppressed.

We have appended to this volume four fragmentary tales that, so far as can be learned, Howard never completed. Two of these will fall into the Cthulhu Mythos: "The House" concerns Justin Geoffrey, and provides a tantalizing hint of where his madness began; the "Untitled Fragment" that begins "Beneath the glare of the sun..." explicitly links the Conan series to the Mythos, through discussion of Conan's Hyborian Age in Nameless Cults. (The title Unaussprechlichen Kulten, used here by Howard for the only time, was actually coined by August Derleth, at the request of Lovecraft, who had wanted a title that would serve as the original German. Lovecraft ardently promoted the use of Derleth's version because of its "sinister, mouth-filling rhythm.") The other two fragments employ, in my view, some very interesting concepts. "Golnor the Ape," with its protagonist who had "lived in two worlds" and who is yet able to see and converse with beings of that mysterious "other" world, and "Spectres in the Dark," in which men seem to be driven mad by things that move in the shadows but cannot be seen, offer intriguing glimpses into the fertile imagination of Robert E. Howard.

Settle back in your chair and let that imagination sweep you into worlds of mystery, adventure, and terror. You might first want to be sure there are no deep shadows in the room.

Rusty Burke

February 2008

In the Forest of Villefere

The sun had set. The great shadows came striding over the forest. In the weird twilight of a late summer day, I saw the path ahead glide on among the mighty trees and disappear. And I shuddered and glanced fearfully over my shoulder. Miles behind lay the nearest village--miles ahead the next.

I looked to left and to right as I strode on, and anon I looked behind me. And anon I stopped short, grasping my rapier, as a breaking twig betokened the going of some small beast. Or was it a beast?

But the path led on and I followed, because, forsooth, I had naught else to do.

As I went I bethought me, "My own thoughts will rout me, if I be not aware. What is there in this forest, except perhaps the creatures that roam it, deer and the like? Tush, the foolish legends of those villagers!"

And so I went and the twilight faded into dusk. Stars began to blink and the leaves of the trees murmured in the faint breeze. And then I stopped short, my sword leaping to my hand, for just ahead, around a curve of the path, someone was singing. The words I could not distinguish, but the accent was strange, almost barbaric.

I stepped behind a great tree, and the cold sweat beaded my forehead. Then the singer came in sight, a tall, thin man, vague in the twilight. I shrugged my shoulders. A man I did not fear. I sprang out, my point raised.

"Stand!"

He showed no surprize. "I prithee, handle thy blade with care, friend," he said.

Somewhat ashamed, I lowered my sword.

"I am new to this forest," I quoth, apologetically. "I heard talk of bandits. I crave pardon. Where lies the road to Villefere?"

"Corbleu, you've missed it," he answered. "You should have branched off to the right some distance back. I am going there myself. If you may abide my company, I will direct you."

I hesitated. Yet why should I hesitate?

"Why, certainly. My name is de Montour, of Normandy."

"And I am Carolus le Loup."

"No!" I started back.

He looked at me in astonishment.

"Pardon," said I; "the name is strange. Does not loup mean wolf?"

"My family were always great hunters," he answered. He did not offer his hand.

"You will pardon my staring," said I as we walked down the path, "but I can hardly see your face in the dusk."

I sensed that he was laughing, though he made no sound.

"It is little to look upon," he answered.

I stepped closer and then leaped away, my hair bristling.

"A mask!" I exclaimed. "Why do you wear a mask, m'sieu?"

"It is a vow," he explained. "In fleeing a pack of hounds I vowed that if I escaped I would wear a mask for a certain time."

"Hounds, m'sieu?"

"Wolves," he answered quickly; "I said wolves."

We walked in silence for a while and then my companion said, "I am surprized that you walk these woods by night. Few people come these ways even in the day."

"I am in haste to reach the border," I answered. "A treaty has been signed with the English, and the Duke of Burgundy should know of it. The people at the village sought to dissuade me. They spoke of a--wolf that was purported to roam these woods."

"Here the path branches to Villefere," said he, and I saw a narrow, crooked path that I had not seen when I passed it before. It led in amid the darkness of the trees. I shuddered.

"You wish to return to the village?"

"No!" I exclaimed. "No, no! Lead on."

So narrow was the path that we walked single file, he leading. I looked well at him. He was taller, much taller than I, and thin, wiry. He was dressed in a costume that smacked of Spain. A long rapier swung at his hip. He walked with long easy strides, noiselessly.

Then he began to talk of travel and adventure. He spoke of many lands and seas he had seen and many strange things. So we talked and went farther and farther into the forest.

I presumed that he was French, and yet he had a very strange accent, that was neither French nor Spanish nor English, not like any language I had ever heard. Some words he slurred strangely and some he could not pronounce at all.

"This path is not often used, is it?" I asked.

"Not by many," he answered and laughed silently. I shuddered. It was very dark and the leaves whispered together among the branches.

"A fiend haunts this forest," I said.

"So the peasants say," he answered, "but I have roamed it oft and have never seen his face."

Then he began to speak of strange creatures of darkness, and the moon rose and shadows glided among the trees. He looked up at the moon.

"Haste!" said he. "We must reach our destination before the moon reaches her zenith."

We hurried along the trail.

"They say," said I, "that a werewolf haunts these woodlands."

"It might be," said he, and we argued much upon the subject.

"The old women say," said he, "that if a werewolf is slain while a wolf, then he is slain, but if he is slain as a man, then his half-soul will haunt his slayer forever. But haste thee, the moon nears her zenith."

We came into a small moonlit glade and the stranger stopped.

"Let us pause a while," said he.

"Nay, let us be gone," I urged; "I like not this place."

He laughed without sound. "Why," said he, "this is a fair glade. As good as a banquet hall it is, and many times have I feasted here. Ha, ha, ha! Look ye, I will show you a dance." And he began bounding here and there, anon flinging back his head and laughing silently. Thought I, the man is mad.

As he danced his weird dance I looked about me. The trail went not on but stopped in the glade.

"Come," said I, "we must on. Do you not smell the rank, hairy scent that hovers about the glade? Wolves den here. Perhaps they are about us and are gliding upon us even now."

He dropped upon all fours, bounded higher than my head, and came toward me with a strange slinking motion.

"That dance is called the Dance of the Wolf," said he, and my hair bristled.

"Keep off!" I stepped back, and with a screech that set the echoes shuddering he leaped for me, and though a sword hung at his belt he did not draw it. My rapier was half out when he grasped my arm and flung me headlong. I dragged him with me and we struck the ground together. Wrenching a hand free I jerked off the mask. A shriek of horror broke from my lips. Beast eyes glittered beneath that mask, white fangs flashed in the moonlight. The face was that of a wolf.

In an instant those fangs were at my throat. Taloned hands tore the sword from my grasp. I beat at that horrible face with my clenched fists, but his jaws were fastened on my shoulder, his talons tore at my throat. Then I was on my back. The world was fading. Blindly I struck out. My hand dropped, then closed automatically about the hilt of my dagger, which I had been unable to get at. I drew and stabbed.

A terrible, half-bestial bellowing screech. Then I reeled to my feet, free. At my feet lay the werewolf.

I stooped, raised the dagger, then paused, looked up. The moon hovered close to her zenith. If I slew the thing as a man its frightful spirit would haunt me forever. I sat down waiting. The thing watched me with flaming wolf eyes. The long wiry limbs seemed to shrink, to crook; hair seemed to grow upon them. Fearing madness, I snatched up the thing's own sword and hacked it to pieces. Then I flung the sword away and fled.

A Song of the Werewolf Folk

Sink white fangs in the throat of Life,

Lap up the red that gushes

In the cold dark gloom of the bare black stones,

In the gorge where the black wind rushes.

Slink where the titan boulders poise

And the chasms grind thereunder,

Over the mountains black and bare

In the teeth of the brooding thunder.

Why should we wish for the fertile fields,

Valley and crystal fountain?

This is our doom--the hunger-trail,

The wolf and the storm-stalked mountain.

Over us stalk the bellowing gods

Where the dusk and the twilight sever;

Under their iron goatish hoofs

They crunch our skulls forever.

Mercy and hope and pity--all,

Bubbles the black crags sunder;

Hunger is all the gods have left

And the death that lurks thereunder.

Glut mad fangs in the blood of Life

To slake the thirst past sating,

Before the blind worms mouth our bones

And the vulture's beak is grating.

Wolfshead

Fear? Your pardon, Messieurs, but the meaning of fear you do not know. No, I hold to my statement.

You are soldiers, adventurers. You have known the charges of regiments of dragoons, the frenzy of wind-lashed seas. But fear, real hair-raising, horror-crawling fear, you have not known. I myself have known such fear; but until the legions of darkness swirl from hell's gate and the world flames to ruin, will never such fear again be known to men.

Hark, I will tell you the tale; for it was many years ago and half across the world, and none of you will ever see the man of whom I tell you, or seeing, know.

Return, then, with me across the years to a day when I, a reckless young cavalier, stepped from the small boat that had landed me from the ship floating in the harbor, cursed the mud that littered the crude wharf, and strode up the landing toward the castle, in answer to the invitation of an old friend, Dom Vincente da Lusto.

Dom Vincente was a strange, far-sighted man--a strong man, one who saw visions beyond the ken of his time. In his veins, perhaps, ran the blood of those old Phoenicians who, the priests tell us, ruled the seas and built cities in far lands, in the dim ages. His plan of fortune was strange and yet successful; few men would have thought of it; fewer could have succeeded. For his estate was upon the western coast of that dark, mystic continent, that baffler of explorers--Africa.

There by a small bay had he cleared away the sullen jungle, built his castle and his storehouses, and with ruthless hand had he wrested the riches of the land. Four ships he had: three smaller craft and one great galleon. These plied between his domains and the cities of Spain, Portugal, France, and even England, laden with rare woods, ivory, slaves; the thousand strange riches that Dom Vincente had gained by trade and by conquest.

Aye, a wild venture, a wilder commerce. And yet might he have shaped an empire from the dark land, had it not been for the rat-faced Carlos, his nephew--but I run ahead of my tale.

Look, Messieurs, I draw a map on the table, thus, with finger dipped in wine. Here lay the small, shallow harbor, and here the wide wharves. A landing ran thus, up the slight slope with hutlike warehouses on each side, and here it stopped at a wide, shallow moat. Over it went a narrow drawbridge and then one was confronted with a high palisade of logs set in the ground. This extended entirely around the castle.

The castle itself was built on the model of another, earlier age, being more for strength than beauty. Built of stone brought from a great distance; years of labor and a thousand negroes toiling beneath the lash had reared its walls, and now, completed, it offered an almost impregnable appearance. Such was the intention of its builders, for Barbary pirates ranged the coasts, and the horror of a native uprising lurked ever near.

A space of about a half-mile on every side of the castle was kept cleared away and roads had been built through the marshy land. All this had required an immense amount of labor, but man-power was plentiful.

A present to a chief, and he furnished all that was needed. And Portuguese know how to make men work!

Less than three hundred yards to the east of the castle ran a wide, shallow river, which emptied into the harbor. The name has entirely slipt my mind. It was a heathenish title and I could never lay my tongue to it.

I found that I was not the only friend invited to the castle. It seems that once a year or some such matter, Dom Vincente brought a host of jolly companions to his lonely estate and made merry for some weeks, to make up for the work and solitude of the rest of the year.

In fact, it was nearly night, and a great banquet was in progress when I entered. I was acclaimed with great delight, greeted boisterously by friends and introduced to such strangers as were there.

Entirely too weary to take much part in the revelry, I ate, drank quietly, listened to the toasts and songs, and studied the feasters.

Dom Vincente, of course, I knew, as I had been intimate with him for years; also his pretty niece, Ysabel, who was one reason I had accepted his invitation to come to that stinking wilderness. Her second cousin, Carlos, I knew and disliked--a sly, mincing fellow with a face like a mink's. Then there was my old friend, Luigi Verenza, an Italian; and his flirt of a sister, Marcita, making eyes at the men as usual. Then there was a short, stocky German who called himself Baron von Schiller; and Jean Desmarte, an out-at-the-elbows nobleman of Gascony; and Don Florenzo de Seville, a lean, dark, silent man, who called himself a Spaniard and wore a rapier nearly as long as himself.

There were others, men and women, but it was long ago and all their names and faces I do not remember.

But there was one man whose face somehow drew my gaze as an alchemist's magnet draws steel. He was a leanly built man of slightly more than medium height, dressed plainly, almost austerely, and he wore a sword almost as long as the Spaniard's.

But it was neither his clothes nor his sword which attracted my attention. It was his face. A refined, high-bred face, it was furrowed deep with lines that gave it a weary, haggard expression. Tiny scars flecked jaw and forehead as if torn by savage claws; I could have sworn the narrow gray eyes had a fleeting, haunted look in their expression at times.

I leaned over to that flirt, Marcita, and asked the name of the man, as it had slipt my mind that we had been introduced.

"De Montour, from Normandy," she answered. "A strange man. I don't think I like him."

"Then he resists your snares, my little enchantress?" I murmured, long friendship making me as immune from her anger as from her wiles. But she chose not to be angry and answered coyly, glancing from under demurely lowered lashes.

I watched de Montour much, feeling somehow a strange fascination. He ate lightly, drank much, seldom spoke, and then only to answer questions.

Presently, toasts making the rounds, I noticed his companions urging him to rise and give a health. At first he refused, then rose, upon their repeated urgings, and stood silent for a moment, goblet raised. He seemed to dominate, to overawe the group of revelers. Then with a mocking, savage laugh, he lifted the goblet above his head.

"To Solomon," he exclaimed, "who bound all devils! And thrice cursed be he for that some escaped!"

A toast and a curse in one! It was drunk silently, and with many sidelong, doubting glances.

That night I retired early, weary of the long sea voyage and my head spinning from the strength of the wine, of which Dom Vincente kept such great stores.

My room was near the top of the castle and looked out toward the forests of the south and the river. The room was furnished in crude, barbaric splendor, as was all the rest of the castle.

Going to the window, I gazed out at the arquebusier pacing the castle grounds just inside the palisade; at the cleared space lying unsightly and barren in the moonlight; at the forest beyond; at the silent river.

From the native quarters close to the river bank came the weird twanging of some rude lute, sounding a barbaric melody.

In the dark shadows of the forest some uncanny night-bird lifted a mocking voice. A thousand minor notes sounded--birds, and beasts, and the devil knows what else! Some great jungle cat began a hair-lifting yowling. I shrugged my shoulders and turned from the windows. Surely devils lurked in those somber depths.

There came a knock at my door and I opened it, to admit de Montour.

He strode to the window and gazed at the moon, which rode resplendent and glorious.

"The moon is almost full, is it not, Monsieur?" he remarked, turning to me. I nodded, and I could have sworn that he shuddered.

"Your pardon, Monsieur. I will not annoy you further." He turned to go, but at the door turned and retraced his steps.

"Monsieur," he almost whispered, with a fierce intensity, "whatever you do, be sure you bar and bolt your door tonight!"

Then he was gone, leaving me to stare after him bewilderedly.

I dozed off to sleep, the distant shouts of the revelers in my ears, and though I was weary, or perhaps because of it, I slept lightly. While I never really awoke until morning, sounds and noises seemed to drift to me through my veil of slumber, and once it seemed that something was prying and shoving against the bolted door.

As is to be supposed, most of the guests were in a beastly humor the following day and remained in their rooms most of the morning or else straggled down late. Besides Dom Vincente there were really only three of the masculine members sober: de Montour; the Spaniard, de Seville (as he called himself); and myself. The Spaniard never touched wine, and though de Montour consumed incredible quantities of it, it never affected him in any way.

The ladies greeted us most graciously.

"S'truth, Signor," remarked that minx Marcita, giving me her hand with a gracious air that was like to make me snicker, "I am glad to see there are gentlemen among us who care more for our company than for the wine cup; for most of them are most surprizingly befuddled this morning."

Then with a most outrageous turning of her wondrous eyes, "Methinks someone was too drunk to be discreet last night--or not drunk enough. For unless my poor senses deceive me much, someone came fumbling at my door late in the night."

"Ha!" I exclaimed in quick anger, "some--!"

"No. Hush." She glanced about as if to see that we were alone, then: "Is it not strange that Signor de Montour, before he retired last night, instructed me to fasten my door firmly?"

"Strange," I murmured, but did not tell her that he had told me the same thing.

"And is it not strange, Pierre, that though Signor de Montour left the banquet hall even before you did, yet he has the appearance of one who has been up all night?"

I shrugged. A woman's fancies are often strange.

"Tonight," she said roguishly, "I will leave my door unbolted and see whom I catch."

"You will do no such thing."

She showed her little teeth in a contemptuous smile and displayed a small, wicked dagger.

"Listen, imp. De Montour gave me the same warning he did you. Whatever he knew, whoever prowled the halls last night, the object was more apt murder than amorous adventure. Keep you your doors bolted. The lady Ysabel shares your room, does she not?"

"Not she. And I send my woman to the slave quarters at night," she murmured, gazing mischievously at me from beneath drooping eyelids.

"One would think you a girl of no character from your talk," I told her, with the frankness of youth and of long friendship. "Walk with care, young lady, else I tell your brother to spank you."

And I walked away to pay my respects to Ysabel. The Portuguese girl was the very opposite of Marcita, being a shy, modest young thing, not so beautiful as the Italian, but exquisitely pretty in an appealing, almost childish air. I once had thoughts--Hi ho! To be young and foolish!

Your pardon, Messieurs. An old man's mind wanders. It was of de Montour that I meant to tell you--de Montour and Dom Vincente's mink-faced cousin.

A band of armed natives were thronged about the gates, kept at a distance by the Portuguese soldiers.

Among them were some score of young men and women all naked, chained neck to neck. Slaves they were, captured by some warlike tribe and brought for sale. Dom Vincente looked them over personally.

Followed a long haggling and bartering, of which I quickly wearied and turned away, wondering that a man of Dom Vincente's rank could so demean himself as to stoop to trade.

But I strolled back when one of the natives of the village near by came up and interrupted the sale with a long harangue to Dom Vincente.

While they talked de Montour came up, and presently Dom Vincente turned to us and said, "One of the woodcutters of the village was torn to pieces by a leopard or some such beast last night. A strong young man and unmarried."

"A leopard? Did they see it?" suddenly asked de Montour, and when Dom Vincente said no, that it came and went in the night, de Montour lifted a trembling hand and drew it across his forehead, as if to brush away cold sweat.

"Look you, Pierre," quoth Dom Vincente, "I have here a slave who, wonder of wonders, desires to be your man. Though the devil only knows why."

He led up a slim young Jakri, a mere youth, whose main asset seemed a merry grin.

"He is yours," said Dom Vincente. "He is goodly trained and will make a fine servant. And look ye, a slave is of an advantage over a servant, for all he requires is food and a loincloth or so with a touch of the whip to keep him in his place."

It was not long before I learned why Gola wished to be "my man," choosing me among all the rest. It was because of my hair. Like many dandies of that day, I wore it long and curled, the strands falling to my shoulders. As it happened, I was the only man of the party who so wore my hair, and Gola would sit and gaze at it in silent admiration for hours at a time, or until, growing nervous under his unblinking scrutiny, I would boot him forth.

It was that night that a brooding animosity, hardly apparent, between Baron von Schiller and Jean Desmarte broke out into a flame.

As usual, woman was the cause. Marcita carried on a most outrageous flirtation with both of them.

That was not wise. Desmarte was a wild young fool. Von Schiller was a lustful beast. But when, Messieurs, did woman ever use wisdom?

Their hate flamed to a murderous fury when the German sought to kiss Marcita.

Swords were clashing in an instant. But before Dom Vincente could thunder a command to halt, Luigi was between the combatants, and had beaten their swords down, hurling them back viciously.

"Signori," said he, softly, but with a fierce intensity, "is it the part of high-bred signori to fight over my sister? Ha, by the toe-nails of Satan, for the toss of a coin I would call you both out! You, Marcita, go to your chamber, instantly, nor leave until I give you permission."

And she went, for, independent though she was, none cared to face the slim, effeminate-appearing youth when a tigerish snarl curled his lips, a murderous gleam lightened his dark eyes.

Apologies were made, but from the glances the two rivals threw at each other, we knew that the quarrel was not forgotten and would blaze forth again at the slightest pretext.

Late that night I woke suddenly with a strange, eery feeling of horror. Why, I could not say. I rose, saw that the door was firmly bolted, and seeing Gola asleep on the floor, kicked him awake irritably.

And just as he got up, hastily, rubbing himself, the silence was broken by a wild scream, a scream that rang through the castle and brought a startled shout from the arquebusier pacing the palisade; a scream from the mouth of a girl, frenzied with terror.

Gola squawked and dived behind the divan. I jerked the door open and raced down the dark corridor.

Dashing down a winding stair, I caromed into someone at the bottom and we tumbled headlong.

He gasped something and I recognized the voice of Jean Desmarte. I hauled him to his feet, and raced along, he following; the screams had ceased, but the whole castle was in an uproar, voices shouting, the clank of weapons, lights flashing up, Dom Vincente's voice shouting for the soldiers, the noise of armed men rushing through the rooms and falling over each other. With all the confusion, Desmarte, the Spaniard, and I reached Marcita's room just as Luigi darted inside and snatched his sister into his arms.

Others rushed in, carrying lights and weapons, shouting, demanding to know what was occurring.

The girl lay quietly in her brother's arms, her dark hair loose and rippling over her shoulders, her dainty night-garments torn to shreds and exposing her lovely body. Long scratches showed upon her arms, breasts and shoulders.

Presently she opened her eyes, shuddered, then shrieked wildly and clung frantically to Luigi, begging him not to let something take her.

"The door!" she whimpered. "I left it unbarred. And something crept into my room through the darkness.

I struck at it with my dagger and it hurled me to the floor, tearing, tearing at me. Then I fainted."

"Where is von Schiller?" asked the Spaniard, a fierce glint in his dark eyes. Every man glanced at his neighbor. All the guests were there except the German. I noted de Montour, gazing at the terrified girl, his face more haggard than usual. And I thought it strange that he wore no weapon.

"Aye, von Schiller!" exclaimed Desmarte fiercely. And half of us followed Dom Vincente out into the corridor. We began a vengeful search through the castle, and in a small, dark hallway we found von Schiller. On his face he lay, in a crimson, ever widening stain.

"This is the work of some native!" exclaimed Desmarte, face aghast.

"Nonsense," bellowed Dom Vincente. "No native from the outside could pass the soldiers. All slaves, von Schiller's among them, were barred and bolted in the slave quarters, except Gola, who sleeps in Pierre's room, and Ysabel's woman."

"But who else could have done this deed?" exclaimed Desmarte in a fury.

"You!" I said abruptly; "else why ran you so swiftly away from the room of Marcita?"

"Curse you, you lie!" he shouted, and his swift-drawn sword leaped for my breast; but quick as he was, the Spaniard was quicker. Desmarte's rapier clattered against the wall and Desmarte stood like a statue, the Spaniard's motionless point just touching his throat.

"Bind him," said the Spaniard without passion.

"Put down your blade, Don Florenzo," commanded Dom Vincente, striding forward and dominating the scene. "Signor Desmarte, you are one of my best friends, but I am the only law here and duty must be done. Give your word that you will not seek to escape."

"I give it," replied the Gascon calmly. "I acted hastily. I apologize. I was not intentionally running away, but the halls and corridors of this cursed castle confuse me."

Of us all, probably but one man believed him.

"Messieurs!" De Montour stepped forward. "This youth is not guilty. Turn the German over."

Two soldiers did as he asked. De Montour shuddered, pointing. The rest of us glanced once, then recoiled in horror.

"Could man have done that thing?"

"With a dagger--" began someone.

"No dagger makes wounds like that," said the Spaniard. "The German was torn to pieces by the talons of some frightful beast."

We glanced about us, half expecting some hideous monster to leap upon us from the shadows.

We searched that castle; every foot, every inch of it. And we found no trace of any beast.

Dawn was breaking when I returned to my room, to find that Gola had barred himself in; and it took me nearly a half-hour to convince him to let me in.

Having smacked him soundly and berated him for his cowardice, I told him what had taken place, as he could understand French and could speak a weird mixture which he proudly called French.

His mouth gaped and only the whites of his eyes showed as the tale reached its climax.

"Ju ju!" he whispered fearsomely. "Fetish man!"

Suddenly an idea came to me. I had heard vague tales, little more than hints of legends, of the devilish leopard cult that existed on the West Coast. No white man had ever seen one of its votaries, but Dom Vincente had told us tales of beast-men, disguised in skins of leopards, who stole through the midnight jungle and slew and devoured. A ghastly thrill traveled up and down my spine and in an instant I had Gola in a grasp which made him yell.

"Was that a leopard-man?" I hissed, shaking him viciously.

"Massa, massa!" he gasped. "Me good boy! Ju ju man get! More besser no tell!"

"You'll tell me!" I gritted, renewing my endeavors, until, his hands waving feeble protests, he promised to tell me what he knew.

"No leopard-man!" he whispered, and his eyes grew big with supernatural fear. "Moon, he full, woodcutter find, him heap clawed. Find 'nother woodcutter. Big Massa (Dom Vincente) say, 'leopard.'

No leopard. But leopard-man, he come to kill. Something kill leopard-man! Heap claw! Hai, hai!

Moon full again. Something come in lonely hut; claw um woman, claw um pick'n in. Man find um claw up. Big Massa say 'leopard.' Full moon again, and woodcutter find, heap clawed. Now come in castle.

No leopard. But always footmarks of a man! "

I gave a startled, incredulous exclamation.

It was true, Gola averred. Always the footprints of a man led away from the scene of the murder. Then why did the natives not tell the Big Massa that he might hunt down the fiend? Here Gola assumed a crafty expression and whispered in my ear, "The footprints were of a man who wore shoes!"

Even assuming that Gola was lying, I felt a thrill of unexplainable horror. Who, then, did the natives believe was doing these frightful murders?

And he answered: Dom Vincente!

By this time, Messieurs, my mind was in a whirl.

What was the meaning of all this? Who slew the German and sought to ravish Marcita? And as I reviewed the crime, it appeared to me that murder rather than rape was the object of the attack.

Why did de Montour warn us, and then appear to have knowledge of the crime, telling us that Desmarte was innocent and then proving it?

It was all beyond me.

The tale of the slaughter got among the natives, in spite of all we could do, and they appeared restless and nervous, and thrice that day Dom Vincente had a black lashed for insolence. A brooding atmosphere pervaded the castle.

I considered going to Dom Vincente with Gola's tale, but decided to wait awhile.

The women kept their chambers that day, the men were restless and moody. Dom Vincente announced that the sentries would be doubled and some would patrol the corridors of the castle itself. I found myself musing cynically that if Gola's suspicions were true, sentries would be of little good.

I am not, Messieurs, a man to brook such a situation with patience. And I was young then. So as we drank before retiring, I flung my goblet on the table and angrily announced that in spite of man, beast or devil, I slept that night with doors flung wide. And I tramped angrily to my chamber.

Again, as on the first night, de Montour came. And his face was as a man who has looked into the gaping gates of hell.

"I have come," he said, "to ask you--nay, Monsieur, to implore you--to reconsider your rash determination."

I shook my head impatiently.

"You are resolved? Yes? Then I ask you to do this for me, that after I enter my chamber, you will bolt my doors from the outside."

I did as he asked, and then made my way back to my chamber, my mind in a maze of wonderment. I had sent Gola to the slave quarters, and I laid rapier and dagger close at hand. Nor did I go to bed, but crouched in a great chair, in the darkness. Then I had much ado to keep from sleeping. To keep myself awake, I fell to musing on the strange words of de Montour. He seemed to be laboring under great excitement; his eyes hinted of ghastly mysteries known to him alone. And yet his face was not that of a wicked man.

Suddenly the notion took me to go to his chamber and talk with him.

Walking those dark passages was a shuddersome task, but eventually I stood before de Montour's door. I called softly. Silence. I reached out a hand and felt splintered fragments of wood. Hastily I struck flint and steel which I carried, and the flaming tinder showed the great oaken door sagging on its mighty hinges; showed a door smashed and splintered from the inside. And the chamber of de Montour was unoccupied.

Some instinct prompted me to hurry back to my room, swiftly but silently, shoeless feet treading softly.

And as I neared the door, I was aware of something in the darkness before me. Something which crept in from a side corridor and glided stealthily along.

In a wild panic of fear I leaped, striking wildly and aimlessly in the darkness. My clenched fist encountered a human head, and something went down with a crash. Again I struck a light; a man lay senseless on the floor, and he was de Montour.

I thrust a candle into a niche in the wall, and just then de Montour's eyes opened and he rose uncertainly.

"You!" I exclaimed, hardly knowing what I said. "You, of all men!"

He merely nodded.

"You killed von Schiller?"

"Yes."

I recoiled with a gasp of horror.

"Listen." He raised his hand. "Take your rapier and run me through. No man will touch you."

"No," I exclaimed. "I can not."

"Then, quick," he said hurriedly, "get into your chamber and bolt the door. Haste! It will return!"

"What will return?" I asked, with a thrill of horror. "If it will harm me, it will harm you. Come into the chamber with me."

"No, no!" he fairly shrieked, springing back from my outstretched arm. "Haste, haste! It left me for an instant, but it will return." Then in a low-pitched voice of indescribable horror: "It is returning. It is here now! "

And I felt a something, a formless, shapeless presence near. A thing of frightfulness.

De Montour was standing, legs braced, arms thrown back, fists clenched. The muscles bulged beneath his skin, his eyes widened and narrowed, the veins stood out upon his forehead as if in great physical effort. As I looked, to my horror, out of nothing, a shapeless, nameless something took vague form!

Like a shadow it moved upon de Montour.

It was hovering about him! Good God, it was merging, becoming one with the man!

De Montour swayed; a great gasp escaped him. The dim thing vanished. De Montour wavered. Then he turned toward me, and may God grant that I never look on a face like that again!

It was a hideous, a bestial face. The eyes gleamed with a frightful ferocity; the snarling lips were drawn back from gleaming teeth, which to my startled gaze appeared more like bestial fangs than human teeth.

Silently the thing (I can not call it a human) slunk toward me. Gasping with horror I sprang back and through the door, just as the thing launched itself through the air, with a sinuous motion which even then made me think of a leaping wolf. I slammed the door, holding it against the frightful thing which hurled itself again and again against it.

Finally it desisted and I heard it slink stealthily off down the corridor. Faint and exhausted I sat down, waiting, listening. Through the open window wafted the breeze, bearing all the scents of Africa, the spicy and the foul. From the native village came the sound of a native drum. Other drums answered farther up the river and back in the bush. Then from somewhere in the jungle, horridly incongruous, sounded the long, high-pitched call of a timber wolf. My soul revolted.

Dawn brought a tale of terrified villagers, of a negro woman torn by some fiend of the night, barely escaping. And to de Montour I went.

On the way I met Dom Vincente. He was perplexed and angry.

"Some hellish thing is at work in this castle," he said. "Last night, though I have said naught of it to anyone, something leaped upon the back of one of the arquebusiers, tore the leather jerkin from his shoulders and pursued him to the barbican. More, someone locked de Montour into his room last night, and he was forced to smash the door to get out."

He strode on, muttering to himself, and I proceeded down the stairs, more puzzled than ever.

De Montour sat upon a stool, gazing out the window. An indescribable air of weariness was about him.

His long hair was uncombed and tousled, his garments were tattered. With a shudder I saw faint crimson stains upon his hands, and noted that the nails were torn and broken.

He looked up as I came in, and waved me to a seat. His face was worn and haggard, but was that of a man.

After a moment's silence, he spoke.

"I will tell you my strange tale. Never before has it passed my lips, and why I tell you, knowing that you will not believe me, I can not say."

And then I listened to what was surely the wildest, the most fantastic, the weirdest tale ever heard by man.

"Years ago," said de Montour, "I was upon a military mission in northern France. Alone, I was forced to pass through the fiend-haunted woodlands of Villefere. In those frightful forests I was beset by an inhuman, a ghastly thing--a werewolf. Beneath a midnight moon we fought, and I slew it. Now this is the truth: that if a werewolf is slain in the half-form of a man, its ghost will haunt its slayer through eternity. But if it is slain as a wolf, hell gapes to receive it. The true werewolf is not (as many think) a man who may take the form of a wolf, but a wolf who takes the form of a man!

"Now listen, my friend, and I will tell you of the wisdom, the hellish knowledge that is mine, gained through many a frightful deed, imparted to me amid the ghastly shadows of midnight forests where fiends and half-beasts roamed.

"In the beginning, the world was strange, misshapen. Grotesque beasts wandered through its jungles.

Driven from another world, ancient demons and fiends came in great numbers and settled upon this newer, younger world. Long the forces of good and evil warred.

"A strange beast, known as man, wandered among the other beasts, and since good or bad must have a concrete form ere either accomplishes its desire, the spirits of good entered man. The fiends entered other beast, reptiles and birds; and long and fiercely waged the age-old battle. But man conquered. The great dragons and serpents were slain and with them the demons. Finally, Solomon, wise beyond the ken of man, made great war upon them, and by virtue of his wisdom, slew, seized and bound. But there were some which were the fiercest, the boldest, and though Solomon drove them out he could not conquer them. Those had taken the form of wolves. As the ages passed, wolf and demon became merged. No longer could the fiend leave the body of the wolf at will. In many instances, the savagery of the wolf overcame the subtlety of the demon and enslaved him, so the wolf became again only a beast, a fierce, cunning beast, but merely a beast. But of the werewolves, there are many, even yet.

"And during the time of the full moon, the wolf may take the form, or the half-form, of a man. When the moon hovers at her zenith, however, the wolf-spirit again takes ascendancy and the werewolf becomes a true wolf once more. But if it is slain in the form of a man, then the spirit is free to haunt its slayer through the ages.

"Harken now. I had thought to have slain the thing after it had changed to its true shape. But I slew it an instant too soon. The moon, though it approached the zenith, had not yet reached it, nor had the thing taken on fully the wolf-form.

"Of this I knew nothing and went my way. But when the next time approached for the full moon, I began to be aware of a strange, malicious influence. An atmosphere of horror hovered in the air and I was aware of inexplicable, uncanny impulses.

"One night in a small village in the center of a great forest, the influence came upon me with full power. It was night, and the moon, nearly full, was rising over the forest. And between the moon and me, I saw, floating in the upper air, ghostly and barely discernible, the outline of a wolf's head!

"I remember little of what happened thereafter. I remember, dimly, clambering into the silent street, remember struggling, resisting briefly, vainly, and the rest is a crimson maze, until I came to myself the next morning and found my garments and hands caked and stained crimson; and heard the horrified chattering of the villagers, telling of a pair of clandestine lovers, slaughtered in a ghastly manner, scarcely outside the village, torn to pieces as if by wild beasts, as if by wolves.

"From that village I fled aghast, but I fled not alone. In the day I could not feel the drive of my fearful captor, but when night fell and the moon rose, I ranged the silent forest, a frightful thing, a slayer of humans, a fiend in a man's body.

"God, the battles I have fought! But always it overcame me and drove me ravening after some new victim. But after the moon had passed its fullness, the thing's power over me ceased suddenly. Nor did it return until three nights before the moon was full again.

"Since then I have roamed the world--fleeing, fleeing, seeking to escape. Always the thing follows, taking possession of my body when the moon is full. Gods, the frightful deeds I have done!

"I would have slain myself long ago but I dare not. For the soul of a suicide is accurst, and my soul would be forever hunted through the flames of hell. And harken, most frightful of all, my slain body would forever roam the earth, moved and inhabited by the soul of the werewolf! Can any thought be more ghastly?

"And I seem immune to the weapons of man. Swords have pierced me, daggers have hacked me. I am covered with scars. Yet never have they struck me down. In Germany they bound and led me to the block. There would I have willingly placed my head, but the thing came upon me, and breaking my bonds, I slew and fled. Up and down the world I have wandered, leaving horror and slaughter in my trail.

Chains, cells, can not hold me. The thing is fastened to me through all eternity.

"In desperation I accepted Dom Vincente's invitation, for look you, none knows of my frightful double life, since no one could recognize me in the clutch of the demon; and few, seeing me, live to tell of it.

"My hands are red, my soul doomed to everlasting flames, my mind is torn with remorse for my crimes.

And yet I can do nothing to help myself. Surely, Pierre, no man ever knew the hell that I have known.

"Yes, I slew von Schiller, and I sought to destroy the girl, Marcita. Why I did not, I can not say, for I have slain both women and men.

"Now, if you will, take your sword and slay me, and with my last breath I will give you the good God's blessing. No?

"You know now my tale and you see before you a man, fiend-haunted for all eternity."

My mind was spinning with wonderment as I left the room of de Montour. What to do, I knew not. It seemed likely that he would yet murder us all, and yet I could not bring myself to tell Dom Vincente all.

From the bottom of my soul I pitied de Montour.

So I kept my peace, and in the days that followed I made occasion to seek him out and converse with him. A real friendship sprang up between us.

About this time that black devil, Gola, began to wear an air of suppressed excitement, as if he knew something he wished desperately to tell, but would not or else dared not.

So the days passed in feasting, drinking and hunting, until one night de Montour came to my chamber and pointed silently at the moon which was just rising.

"Look ye," he said, "I have a plan. I will give it out that I am going into the jungle for hunting and will go forth, apparently for several days. But at night I will return to the castle, and you must lock me into the dungeon which is used as a storeroom."

This we did, and I managed to slip down twice a day and carry food and drink to my friend. He insisted on remaining in the dungeon even in the day, for though the fiend had never exerted its influence over him in the daytime, and he believed it powerless then, yet he would take no chances.

It was during this time that I began to notice that Dom Vincente's mink-faced cousin, Carlos, was forcing his attentions upon Ysabel, who was his second cousin, and who seemed to resent those attentions.

Myself, I would have challenged him for a duel for the toss of a coin, for I despised him, but it was really none of my affair. However, it seemed that Ysabel feared him.

My friend Luigi, by the way, had become enamored of the dainty Portuguese girl, and was making swift love to her daily.

And de Montour sat in his cell and reviewed his ghastly deeds until he battered the bars with his bare hands.

And Don Florenzo wandered about the castle grounds like a dour Mephistopheles.

And the other guests rode and quarreled and drank.

And Gola slithered about, eyeing me as if always on the point of imparting momentous information. What wonder if my nerves became rasped to the shrieking point?

Each day the natives grew surlier and more and more sullen and intractable.

One night, not long before the full of the moon, I entered the dungeon where de Montour sat.

He looked up quickly.

"You dare much, coming to me in the night."

I shrugged my shoulders, seating myself.

A small barred window let in the night scents and sounds of Africa.

"Hark to the native drums," I said. "For the past week they have sounded almost incessantly."

De Montour assented.

"The natives are restless. Methinks 'tis deviltry they are planning. Have you noticed that Carlos is much among them?"

"No," I answered, "but 'tis like there will be a break between him and Luigi. Luigi is paying court to Ysabel."

So we talked, when suddenly de Montour became silent and moody, answering only in monosyllables.

The moon rose and peered in at the barred windows. De Montour's face was illuminated by its beams.

And then the hand of horror grasped me. On the wall behind de Montour appeared a shadow, a shadow clearly defined of a wolf's head!

At the same instant de Montour felt its influence. With a shriek he bounded from his stool.

He pointed fiercely, and as with trembling hands I slammed and bolted the door behind me, I felt him hurl his weight against it. As I fled up the stairway I heard a wild raving and battering at the iron-bound door.

But with all the werewolf 's might the great door held.

As I entered my room, Gola dashed in and gasped out the tale he had been keeping for days.

I listened, incredulously, and then dashed forth to find Dom Vincente.

I was told that Carlos had asked him to accompany him to the village to arrange a sale of slaves.

My informer was Don Florenzo of Seville, and when I gave him a brief outline of Gola's tale, he accompanied me.

Together we dashed through the castle gate, flinging a word to the guards, and down the landing toward the village.

Dom Vincente, Dom Vincente, walk with care, keep sword loosened in its sheath! Fool, fool, to walk in the night with Carlos, the traitor!

They were nearing the village when we caught up with them. "Dom Vincente!" I exclaimed; "return instantly to the castle. Carlos is selling you into the hands of the natives! Gola has told me that he lusts for your wealth and for Ysabel! A terrified native babbled to him of booted footprints near the places where the woodcutters were murdered, and Carlos has made the blacks believe that the slayer was you!

Tonight the natives were to rise and slay every man in the castle except Carlos! Do you not believe me, Dom Vincente?"

"Is this truth, Carlos?" asked Dom Vincente, in amaze.

Carlos laughed mockingly.

"The fool speaks truth," he said, "but it accomplishes you nothing. Ho!"

He shouted as he leaped for Dom Vincente. Steel flashed in the moonlight and the Spaniard's sword was through Carlos ere he could move.

And the shadows rose about us. Then it was back to back, sword and dagger, three men against a hundred. Spears flashed, and a fiendish yell went up from savage throats. I spitted three natives in as many thrusts and then went down from a stunning swing from a war-club, and an instant later Dom Vincente fell upon me, with a spear in one arm and another through the leg. Don Florenzo was standing above us, sword leaping like a living thing, when a charge of the arquebusiers swept the river bank clear and we were borne into the castle.

The black hordes came with a rush, spears flashing like a wave of steel, a thunderous roar of savagery going up to the skies.

Time and again they swept up the slopes, bounding the moat, until they were swarming over the palisades. And time and again the fire of the hundred-odd defenders hurled them back.

They had set fire to the plundered warehouses, and their light vied with the light of the moon. Just across the river there was a larger storehouse, and about this hordes of the natives gathered, tearing it apart for plunder.

"Would that they would drop torch upon it," said Dom Vincente, "for naught is stored therein save some thousand pounds of gunpowder. I dared not store the treacherous stuff this side the river. All the tribes of the river and coast have gathered for our slaughter and all my ships are upon the seas.

"We may hold out awhile, but eventually they will swarm the palisade and put us to the slaughter."

I hastened to the dungeon wherein de Montour sat. Outside the door I called to him and he bade me enter in voice which told me the fiend had left him for an instant.

"The blacks have risen," I told him.

"I guessed as much. How goes the battle?"

I gave him the details of the betrayal and the fight, and mentioned the powder-house across the river. He sprang to his feet.

"Now by my hag-ridden soul!" he exclaimed; "I will fling the dice once more with hell! Swift, let me out of the castle! I will essay to swim the river and set off yon powder!"

"It is insanity!" I exclaimed. "A thousand blacks lurk between the palisades and the river, and thrice that number beyond! The river itself swarms with crocodiles!"

"I will attempt it!" he answered, a great light in his face. "If I can reach it, some thousand natives will lighten the siege; if I am slain, then my soul is free and mayhap will gain some forgiveness for that I gave my life to atone for my crimes."

Then, "Haste," he exclaimed, "for the demon is returning! Already I feel his influence! Haste ye!"

For the castle gates we sped, and as de Montour ran he gasped as a man in a terrific battle.

At the gate he pitched headlong, then rose, to spring through it. Wild yells greeted him from the natives.

The arquebusiers shouted curses at him and at me. Peering down from the top of the palisades I saw him turn from side to side uncertainly. A score of natives were rushing recklessly forward, spears raised.

Then the eery wolf-yell rose to the skies, and de Montour bounded forward. Aghast, the natives paused, and before a man of them could move he was among them. Wild shrieks, not of rage, but of terror.

In amazement the arquebusiers held their fire.

Straight through the group of blacks de Montour charged, and when they broke and fled, three of them fled not.

A dozen steps de Montour took in pursuit; then stopped stock-still. A moment he stood so, while spears flew about him, then turned and ran swiftly in the direction of the river.

A few steps from the river another band of blacks barred his way. In the flaming light of the burning houses the scene was clearly illuminated. A thrown spear tore through de Montour's shoulder. Without pausing in his stride he tore it forth and drove it through a native, leaping over his body to get among the others.

They could not face the fiend-driven white man. With shrieks they fled, and de Montour, bounding upon the back of one, brought him down.

Then he rose, staggered and sprang to the river bank. An instant he paused there and then vanished in the shadows.

"Name of the devil!" gasped Dom Vincente at my shoulder. "What manner of man is that? Was that de Montour?"

I nodded. The wild yells of the natives rose above the crackle of the arquebus fire. They were massed thick about the great warehouse across the river.

"They plan a great rush," said Dom Vincente. "They will swarm clear over the palisade, methinks. Ha!"

A crash that seemed to rip the skies apart! A burst of flame that mounted to the stars! The castle rocked with the explosion. Then silence, as the smoke, drifting away, showed only a great crater where the warehouse had stood.

I could tell of how Dom Vincente led a charge, crippled as he was, out of the castle gate and down the slope, to fall upon the terrified blacks who had escaped the explosion. I could tell of the slaughter, of the victory and the pursuit of the fleeing natives.

I could tell, too, Messieurs, of how I became separated from the band and of how I wandered far into the jungle, unable to find my way back to the coast.

I could tell how I was captured by a wandering band of slave raiders, and of how I escaped. But such is not my intention. In itself it would make a long tale; and it is of de Montour that I am speaking.

I thought much of the things that had passed and wondered if indeed de Montour reached the storehouse to blow it to the skies or whether it was but the deed of chance.

That a man could swim that reptile-swarming river, fiend-driven though he was, seemed impossible. And if he blew up the storehouse, he must have gone up with it.

So one night I pushed my way wearily through the jungle and sighted the coast, and close to the shore a small, tumble-down hut of thatch. To it I went, thinking to sleep therein if insects and reptiles would allow.

I entered the doorway and then stopped short. Upon a makeshift stool sat a man. He looked up as I entered and the rays of the moon fell across his face.

I started back with a ghastly thrill of horror. It was de Montour, and the moon was full!

Then as I stood, unable to flee, he rose and came toward me. And his face, though haggard as of a man who has looked into hell, was the face of a sane man.

"Come in, my friend," he said, and there was a great peace in his voice. "Come in and fear me not. The fiend has left me forever."

"But tell me, how conquered you?" I exclaimed as I grasped his hand.

"I fought a frightful battle, as I ran to the river," he answered, "for the fiend had me in its grasp and drove me to fall upon the natives. But for the first time my soul and mind gained ascendancy for an instant, an instant just long enough to hold me to my purpose. And I believe the good saints came to my aid, for I was giving my life to save life.

"I leaped into the river and swam, and in an instant the crocodiles were swarming about me.

"Again in the clutch of the fiend I fought them, there in the river. Then suddenly the thing left me.

"I climbed from the river and fired the warehouse. The explosion hurled me hundreds of feet, and for days I wandered witless through the jungle.

"But the full moon came, and came again, and I felt not the influence of the fiend.

"I am free, free!" And a wondrous note of exultation, nay, exaltation, thrilled his words:

"My soul is free. Incredible as it seems, the demon lies drowned upon the bed of the river, or else inhabits the body of one of the savage reptiles that swim the ways of the Niger."

Up, John Kane!

Up, John Kane, the grey night's falling;

The sun's sunk in blood and the fog comes crawling;

From hillside to hill the grey wolves are calling;

Will ye come, will ye come, John Kane?

What of the oath that you swore by the river

Where the black shadows lurk and the sun comes never,

And a Shape in the shadows wags its grisly head forever?

You swore by the blood-crust that stained your dagger,

By the haunted woods where hoofed feet swagger,

And under grisly burdens misshapen creatures stagger.

Up, John Kane, and cease your quaking!

You have made the pact which has no breaking,

And your brothers are eager their thirst to be slaking.

Up, John Kane! Why cringe there, and cower?

The pact was sealed with the dark blood-flower;

Glut now your fill in the werewolf 's hour!

Fear not the night nor the shadows that play there;

Soundless and sure shall your bare feet stray there;

Strong shall your teeth be, to rend and to slay there.

Up, John Kane, the thick night's falling;

Up from the valleys the white fog's crawling;

Your four-footed brothers from the hills are calling:

Will ye come, will ye come, John Kane?

Remembrance

Eight thousand years ago a man I slew;

I lay in wait beside a sparkling rill

There in an upland valley green and still.

The white stream gurgled where the rushes grew;

The hills were veiled in dreamy hazes blue.

He came along the trail; with savage skill

My spear leaped like a snake to make my kill--

Leaped like a striking snake and pierced him through.

And still when blue haze dreams along the sky

And breezes bring the murmur of the sea,

A whisper thrills me where at ease I lie

Beneath the branches of some mountain tree;

He comes, fog-dim, the ghost that will not die,

And with accusing finger points at me.

The Dream Snake

The night was strangely still. As we sat upon the wide veranda, gazing out over the broad, shadowy lawns, the silence of the hour entered our spirits and for a long while no one spoke.

Then far across the dim mountains that fringed the eastern skyline, a faint haze began to glow, and presently a great golden moon came up, making a ghostly radiance over the land and etching boldly the dark clumps of shadows that were trees. A light breeze came whispering out of the east, and the unmowed grass swayed before it in long, sinuous waves, dimly visible in the moonlight; and from among the group upon the veranda there came a swift gasp, a sharp intake of breath that caused us all to turn and gaze.

Faming was leaning forward, clutching the arms of his chair, his face strange and pallid in the spectral light; a thin trickle of blood seeping from the lip in which he had set his teeth. Amazed, we looked at him, and suddenly he jerked about with a short, snarling laugh.

"There's no need of gawking at me like a flock of sheep!" he said irritably and stopped short. We sat bewildered, scarcely knowing what sort of reply to make, and suddenly he burst out again.

"Now I guess I'd better tell the whole thing or you'll be going off and putting me down as a lunatic. Don't interrupt me, any of you! I want to get this thing off my mind. You all know that I'm not a very imaginative man; but there's a thing, purely a figment of imagination, that has haunted me since babyhood.

A dream!" He fairly cringed back in his chair as he muttered, "A dream! and God, what a dream! The first time--no, I can't remember the first time I ever dreamed it--I've been dreaming the hellish thing ever since I can remember. Now it's this way: there is a sort of bungalow, set upon a hill in the midst of wide grasslands--not unlike this estate; but this scene is in Africa. And I am living there with a sort of servant, a Hindoo. Just why I am there is never clear to my waking mind, though I am always aware of the reason in my dreams. As a man of a dream, I remember my past life (a life which in no way corresponds with my waking life), but when I am awake my subconscious mind fails to transmit these impressions.

However, I think that I am a fugitive from justice and the Hindoo is also a fugitive. How the bungalow came to be there I can never remember, nor do I know in what part of Africa it is, though all these things are known to my dream self. But the bungalow is a small one of a very few rooms, and is situated upon the top of the hill, as I said. There are no other hills about and the grasslands stretch to the horizon in every direction; knee-high in some places, waist-high in others.

"Now the dream always opens as I am coming up the hill, just as the sun is beginning to set. I am carrying a broken rifle and I have been on a hunting trip; how the rifle was broken, and the full details of the trip, I clearly remember--dreaming. But never upon waking. It is just as if a curtain were suddenly raised and a drama began; or just as if I were suddenly transferred to another man's body and life, remembering past years of that life, and not cognizant of any other existence. And that is the hellish part of it! As you know, most of us, dreaming, are, at the back of our consciousness, aware that we are dreaming. No matter how horrible the dream may become, we know that it is a dream, and thus insanity or possible death is staved off. But in this particular dream, there is no such knowledge. I tell you it is so vivid, so complete in every detail, that I wonder sometimes if that is not my real existence and this a dream! But no; for then I should have been dead years ago.

"As I was saying, I come up the hill and the first thing I am cognizant of that is out of the ordinary is a sort of track leading up the hill in an irregular way; that is, the grass is mashed down as if something heavy had been dragged over it. But I pay no especial attention to it, for I am thinking, with some irritation, that the broken rifle I carry is my only arm and that now I must forego hunting until I can send for another.

"You see, I remember thoughts and impressions of the dream itself, of the occurrences of the dream; it is the memories that the dream 'I' has, of that other dream existence that I can not remember. So. I come up the hill and enter the bungalow. The doors are open and the Hindoo is not there. But the main room is in confusion; chairs are broke, a table overturned. The Hindoo's dagger is lying upon the floor, but there is no blood anywhere.

"Now, in my dreams, I never remember the other dreams, as sometimes one does. Always it is the first dream, the first time. I always experience the same sensations, in my dreams, with as vivid a force as the first time I ever dreamed. So. I am not able to understand this. The Hindoo is gone, but (thus I ruminate, standing in the center of the disordered room) what did away with him? Had it been a raiding party of negroes they would have looted the bungalow and probably burned it. Had it been a lion, the place would have been smeared with blood. Then suddenly I remember the track I saw going up the hill, and a cold hand touches my spine; for instantly the whole thing is clear: the thing that came up from the grasslands and wrought havoc in the little bungalow could be naught else except a giant serpent. And as I think of the size of the spoor, cold sweat beads my forehead and the broken rifle shakes in my hand.

"Then I rush to the door in a wild panic, my only thought to make a dash for the coast. But the sun has set and dusk is stealing across the grasslands. And out there somewhere, lurking in the tall grass is that grisly thing--that horror. God!" The ejaculation broke from his lips with such feeling that all of us started, not realizing the tension we had reached. There was a second's silence, then he continued:

"So I bolt the doors and windows, light the lamp I have and take my stand in the middle of the room.

And I stand like a statue--waiting--listening. After a while the moon comes up and her haggard light drifts through the windows. And I stand still in the center of the room; the night is very still--something like this night; the breeze occasionally whispers through the grass, and each time I start and clench my hands until the nails bite into the flesh and the blood trickles down my wrists--and I stand there and wait and listen but it does not come that night!" The sentence came suddenly and explosively, and an involuntary sigh came from the rest; a relaxing of tension.

"I am determined, if I live the night through, to start for the coast early the next morning, taking my chance out there in the grim grasslands--with it. But with morning, I dare not. I do not know in which direction the monster went; and I dare not risk coming upon him in the open, unarmed as I am. So, as in a maze, I remain at the bungalow, and ever my eyes turn toward the sun, lurching relentlessly down the sky toward the horizon. Ah, God! if I could but halt the sun in the sky!"

The man was in the clutch of some terrific power; his words fairly leaped at us.

"Then the sun rocks down the sky and the long gray shadows come stalking across the grasslands. Dizzy with fear, I have bolted the doors and windows and lighted the lamp long before the last faint glow of twilight fades. The light from the windows may attract the monster, but I dare not stay in the dark. And again I take my stand in the center of the room--waiting."

There was a shuddersome halt. Then he continued, barely above a whisper, moistening his lips: "There is no knowing how long I stand there; Time has ceased to be and each second is an eon; each minute is an eternity stretching into endless eternities. Then, God! but what is that?" he leaned forward, the moonlight etching his face into such a mask of horrified listening that each of us shivered and flung a hasty glance over our shoulders.

"Not the night breeze this time," he whispered. "Something makes the grasses swish-swish--as if a great, long, pliant weight were being dragged through them. Above the bungalow it swishes and then ceases--in front of the door; then the hinges creak--creak! The door begins to bulge inward--a small bit--then some more!" The man's arms were held in front of him, as if braced strongly against something, and his breath came in quick gasps. "And I know I should lean against the door and hold it shut, but I do not, I can not move. I stand there, like a sheep waiting to be slaughtered--but the door holds!" Again that sigh expressive of pent-up feeling.

He drew a shaky hand across his brow. "And all night I stand in the center of that room, as motionless as an image, except to turn slowly, as the swish-swish of the grass marks the fiend's course about the house. Ever I keep my eyes in the direction of that soft, sinister sound. Sometimes it ceases for an instant, or for several minutes, and then I stand scarcely breathing, for a horrible obsession has it that the serpent has in some way made entrance into the bungalow, and I start and whirl this way and that, frightfully fearful of making a noise, though I know not why, but ever with the feeling that the thing is at my back.

Then the sounds commence again and I freeze motionless.

"Now here is the only time that my consciousness, which guides my waking hours, ever in any way pierces the veil of dreams. I am, in the dream, in no way conscious that it is a dream, but, in a detached sort of way, my other mind recognizes certain facts and passes them on to my sleeping--shall I say 'ego'?

That is to say, my personality is for an instant truly dual and separate to an extent, as the right and left arms are separate, while making up parts in the same entity. My dreaming mind has no cognizance of my higher mind; for the time being the other mind is subordinated and the subconscious mind is in full control, to such an extent that it does not even recognize the existence of the other. But the conscious mind, now sleeping, is cognizant of dim thought-waves emanating from the dream mind. I know that I have not made this entirely clear, but the fact remains that I know that my mind, conscious and subconscious, is near to ruin. My obsession of fear, as I stand there in my dream, is that the serpent will raise itself and peer into the window at me. And I know, in my dream, that if this occurs I shall go insane. And so vivid is the impression imparted to my conscious, now sleeping mind that the thought-waves stir the dim seas of sleep, and somehow I can feel my sanity rocking as my sanity rocks in my dream. Back and forth it totters and sways until the motion takes on a physical aspect and I in my dream am swaying from side to side. Not always is the sensation the same, but I tell you, if that horror ever raises its terrible shape and leers at me, if I ever see the fearful thing in my dream, I shall become stark, wild insane." There was a restless movement among the rest.

"God! but what a prospect!" he muttered. "To be insane and forever dreaming that same dream, night and day! But there I stand, and centuries go by, but at last a dim gray light begins to steal through the windows, the swishing dies away in the distance and presently a red, haggard sun climbs the eastern sky.

Then I turn about and gaze into a mirror--and my hair has become perfectly white. I stagger to the door and fling it wide. There is nothing in sight but a wide track leading away down the hill through the grasslands--in the opposite direction from that which I would take toward the coast. And with a shriek of maniacal laughter, I dash down the hill and race across the grasslands. I race until I drop from exhaustion, then I lie until I can stagger up and go on.

"All day I keep this up, with superhuman effort, spurred on by the horror behind me. And ever as I hurl myself forward on weakening legs, ever as I lie gasping for breath, I watch the sun with a terrible eagerness. How swiftly the sun travels when a man races it for life! A losing race it is, as I know when I watch the sun sinking toward the skyline, and the hills which I had hoped to gain ere sundown seemingly as far away as ever."

His voice was lowered and instinctively we leaned toward him; he was gripping the chair arms and the blood was seeping from his lip.

"Then the sun sets and the shadows come and I stagger on and fall and rise and reel on again. And I laugh, laugh, laugh! Then I cease, for the moon comes up and throws the grasslands in ghostly and silvery relief. The light is white across the land, though the moon itself is like blood. And I look back the way I have come--and far--back"--all of us leaned farther toward him, our hair a-prickle; his voice came like a ghostly whisper--"far back--I--see--the--grass--waving. There is no breeze, but the tall grass parts and sways in the moonlight, in a narrow, sinuous line--far away, but nearing every instant." His voice died away.

Somebody broke the ensuing stillness: "And then--?"

"Then I awake. Never yet have I seen the foul monster. But that is the dream that haunts me, and from which I have wakened, in my childhood screaming, in my manhood in cold sweat. At irregular intervals I dream it, and each time, lately"--he hesitated and then went on--"each time lately, the thing has been getting closer--closer--the waving of the grass marks his progress and he nears me with each dream; and when he reaches me, then--"

He stopped short, then without a word rose abruptly and entered the house. The rest of us sat silent for awhile, then followed him, for it was late.

How long I slept I do not know, but I woke suddenly with the impression that somewhere in the house someone had laughed, long, loud and hideously, as a maniac laughs. Starting up, wondering if I had been dreaming, I rushed from my room, just as a truly horrible shriek echoed through the house. The place was now alive with other people who had been awakened, and all of us rushed to Faming's room, whence the sounds had seemed to come.

Faming lay dead upon the floor, where it seemed he had fallen in some terrific struggle. There was no mark upon him, but his face was terribly distorted; as the face of a man who had been crushed by some superhuman force--such as some gigantic snake.

Sea Curse

And some return by the failing light

And some in the waking dream,

For she hears the heels of the dripping ghosts

That ride the rough roofbeam.

--Kipling

They were the brawlers and braggarts, the loud boasters and hard drinkers, of Faring town, John Kulrek and his crony Lie-lip Canool. Many a time have I, a tousled-haired lad, stolen to the tavern door to listen to their curses, their profane arguments and wild sea songs; half fearful and half in admiration of these wild rovers. Aye, all the people of Faring town gazed on them with fear and admiration, for they were not like the rest of the Faring men; they were not content to ply their trade along the coasts and among the shark-teeth shoals. No yawls, no skiffs for them! They fared far, farther than any other man in the village, for they shipped on the great sailing-ships that went out on the white tides to brave the restless gray ocean and make ports in strange lands.

Ah, I mind it was swift times in the little sea-coast village of Faring when John Kulrek came home, with his furtive Lie-lip at his side, swaggering down the gang-plank, in his tarry sea-clothes, and the broad leather belt that held his ever-ready dagger; shouting condescending greeting to some favored acquaintance, kissing some maiden who ventured too near; then up the street, roaring some scarcely decent song of the sea. How the cringers and the idlers, the hangers-on, would swarm about the two desperate heroes, flattering and smirking, guffawing hilariously at each nasty jest. For to the tavern loafers and to some of the weaker among the straight-forward villagers, these men with their wild talk and their brutal deeds, their tales of the Seven Seas and the far countries, these men, I say, were valiant knights, nature's noblemen who dared to be men of blood and brawn.

And all feared them, so that when a man was beaten or a woman insulted, the villagers muttered--and did nothing. And so when Moll Farrell's niece was put to shame by John Kulrek, none dared even to put in words what all thought. Moll had never married, and she and the girl lived alone in a little hut down close to the beach, so close that in high tide the waves came almost to the door.

The people of the village accounted old Moll something of a witch, and she was a grim, gaunt old dame who had little to say to anyone. But she minded her own business, and eked out a slim living by gathering clams, and picking up bits of driftwood.

The girl was a pretty, foolish little thing, vain and easily befooled, else she had never yielded to the shark-like blandishments of John Kulrek.

I mind the day was a cold winter day with a sharp breeze out of the east when the old dame came into the village street shrieking that the girl had vanished. All scattered over the beach and back among the bleak inland hills to search for her--all save John Kulrek and his cronies who sat in the tavern dicing and toping. All the while beyond the shoals, we heard the never-ceasing droning of the heaving, restless gray monster, and in the dim light of the ghostly dawn Moll Farrell's girl came home.

The tides bore her gently across the wet sands and laid her almost at her own door. Virgin-white she was, and her arms were folded across her still bosom; calm was her face, and the gray tides sighed about her slender limbs. Moll Farrell's eyes were stones, yet she stood above her dead girl and spoke no word till John Kulrek and his crony came reeling down from the tavern, their drinking-jacks still in their hands.

Drunk was John Kulrek, and the people gave back for him, murder in their souls; so he came and laughed at Moll Farrell across the body of her girl.

"Zounds!" swore John Kulrek; "the wench has drowned herself, Lie-lip!"

Lie-lip laughed, with the twist of his thin mouth. He always hated Moll Farrell, for it was she that had given him the name of Lie-lip.

Then John Kulrek lifted his drinking-jack, swaying on his uncertain legs. "A health to the wench's ghost!"

he bellowed, while all stood aghast.

Then Moll Farrell spoke, and the words broke from her in a scream which sent ripples of cold up and down the spines of the throng.

"The curse of the Foul Fiend upon you, John Kulrek!" she screamed. "The curse of God rest upon your vile soul throughout eternity! May you gaze on sights that shall sear the eyes of you and scorch the soul of you! May you die a bloody death and writhe in hell's flames for a million and a million and yet a million years! I curse you by sea and by land, by earth and by air, by the demons of the oceans and the demons of the swamplands, the fiends of the forest and the goblins of the hills! And you"--her lean finger stabbed at Lie-lip Canool and he started backward, his face paling--"you shall be the death of John Kulrek and he shall be the death of you! You shall bring John Kulrek to the doors of hell and John Kulrek shall bring you to the gallows-tree! I set the seal of death upon your brow, John Kulrek! You shall live in terror and die in horror far out upon the cold gray sea! But the sea that took the soul of innocence to her bosom shall not take you, but shall fling forth your vile carcass to the sands! Aye, John Kulrek"--and she spoke with such a terrible intensity that the drunken mockery on the man's face changed to one of swinish stupidity--"the sea roars for the victim it will not keep! There is snow upon the hills, John Kulrek, and ere it melts your corpse will lie at my feet. And I shall spit upon it and be content."

Kulrek and his crony sailed at dawn for a long voyage, and Moll went back to her hut and her clam gathering. She seemed to grow leaner and more grim than ever and her eyes smoldered with a light not sane. The days glided by and people whispered among themselves that Moll's days were numbered, for she faded to a ghost of a woman; but she went her way, refusing all aid.

That was a short, cold summer and the snow on the barren inland hills never melted; a thing very unusual, which caused much comment among the villagers. At dusk and at dawn Moll would come up on the beach, gaze up at the snow which glittered on the hills, then out to sea with a fierce intensity in her gaze.

Then the days grew shorter, the nights longer and darker, and the cold gray tides came sweeping along the bleak strands, bearing the rain and sleet of the sharp east breezes.

And upon a bleak day a trading-vessel sailed into the bay and anchored. And all the idlers and the wastrels flocked to the wharfs, for that was the ship upon which John Kulrek and Lie-lip Canool had sailed. Down the gang-plank came Lie-lip, more furtive than ever, but John Kulrek was not there. To shouted queries, Canool shook his head. "Kulrek deserted ship at a port of Sumatra," said he. "He had a row with the skipper, lads; wanted me to desert, too, but no! I had to see you fine lads again, eh, boys?"

Almost cringing was Lie-lip Canool, and suddenly he recoiled as Moll Farrell came through the throng. A moment they stood eyeing each other; then Moll's grim lips bent in a terrible smile.

"There's blood on your hand, Canool!" she lashed out suddenly--so suddenly that Lie-lip started and rubbed his right hand across his left sleeve.

"Stand aside, witch!" he snarled in sudden anger, striding through the crowd which gave back for him.

His admirers followed him to the tavern.

Now, I mind that the next day was even colder; gray fogs came drifting out of the east and veiled the sea and the beaches. There would be no sailing that day, and so all the villagers were in their snug houses or matching tales at the tavern. So it came about that Joe, my friend, a lad of my own age, and I, were the ones who saw the first of the strange thing that happened.

Being harum-scarum lads of no wisdom, we were sitting in a small rowboat, floating at the end of the wharfs, each shivering and wishing the other would suggest leaving, there being no reason whatever for our being there, save that it was a good place to build air-castles undisturbed.

Suddenly Joe raised his hand. "Say," he said, "d'ye hear? Who can be out on the bay upon a day like this?"

"Nobody. What d'ye hear?"

"Oars. Or I'm a lubber. Listen."

There was no seeing anything in that fog, and I heard nothing. Yet Joe swore he did, and suddenly his face assumed a strange look.

"Somebody rowing out there, I tell you! The bay is alive with oars from the sound! A score of boats at the least! Ye dolt, can ye not hear?"

Then, as I shook my head, he leaped and began to undo the painter.

"I'm off to see. Name me liar if the bay is not full of boats, all together like a close fleet. Are you with me?"

Yes, I was with him, though I heard nothing. Then out in the grayness we went, and the fog closed behind and before so that we drifted in a vague world of smoke, seeing naught and hearing naught. We were lost in no time, and I cursed Joe for leading us upon a wild goose chase that was like to end with our being swept out to sea. I thought of Moll Farrell's girl and shuddered.

How long we drifted I know not. Minutes faded into hours, hours into centuries. Still Joe swore he heard the oars, now close at hand, now far away, and for hours we followed them, steering our course toward the sound, as the noise grew or receded. This I later thought of, and could not understand.

Then, when my hands were so numb that I could no longer hold the oar, and the forerunning drowsiness of cold and exhaustion was stealing over me, bleak white stars broke through the fog which glided suddenly away, fading like a ghost of smoke, and we found ourselves afloat just outside the mouth of the bay. The waters lay smooth as a pond, all dark green and silver in the starlight, and the cold came crisper than ever. I was swinging the boat about, to put back into the bay, when Joe gave a shout, and for the first time I heard the clack of oar-locks. I glanced over my shoulder and my blood went cold.

A great beaked prow loomed above us, a weird, unfamiliar shape against the stars, and as I caught my breath, sheered sharply and swept by us, with a curious swishing I never heard any other craft make. Joe screamed and backed oars frantically, and the boat walled out of the way just in time; for though the prow had missed us, still otherwise we had died. For from the sides of the ship stood long oars, bank upon bank which swept her along. Though I had never seen such a craft, I knew her for a galley. But what was she doing upon our coasts? They said, the far-farers, that such ships were still in use among the heathens of Barbary; but it was many a long, heaving mile to Barbary, and even so she did not resemble the ships described by those who had sailed far.

We started in pursuit, and this was strange, for though the waters broke about her prow, and she seemed fairly to fly through the waves, yet she was making little speed, and it was no time before we caught up with her. Making our painter fast to a chain far back beyond the reach of the swishing oars, we hailed those on deck. But there came no answer, and at last, conquering our fears, we clambered up the chain and found ourselves upon the strangest deck man has trod for many a long, roaring century.

"This is no Barbary rover!" muttered Joe fearsomely. "Look, how old it seems! Almost ready to fall to pieces. Why, 'tis fairly rotten!"

There was no one on deck, no one at the long sweep with which the craft was steered. We stole to the hold and looked down the stair. Then and there, if ever men were on the verge of insanity, it was we. For there were rowers there, it is true; they sat upon the rowers' benches and drove the creaking oars through the gray waters. And they that rowed were skeletons!

Shrieking, we plunged across the deck, to fling ourselves into the sea. But at the rail I tripped upon something and fell headlong, and as I lay, I saw a thing which vanquished my fear of the horrors below for an instant. The thing upon which I had tripped was a human body, and in the dim gray light that was beginning to steal across the eastern waves I saw a dagger hilt standing up between his shoulders. Joe was at the rail, urging me to haste, and together we slid down the chain and cut the painter.

Then we stood off into the bay. Straight on kept the grim galley, and we followed, slowly, wondering.

She seemed to be heading straight for the beach beside the wharfs, and as we approached, we saw the wharfs thronged with people. They had missed us, no doubt, and now they stood, there in the early dawn light, struck dumb by the apparition which had come up out of the night and the grim ocean.

Straight on swept the galley, her oars a-swish; then ere she reached the shallow water--crash!--a terrific reverberation shook the bay. Before our eyes the grim craft seemed to melt away; then she vanished, and the green waters seethed where she had ridden, but there floated no driftwood there, nor did there ever float any ashore. Aye, something floated ashore, but it was grim driftwood!

We made the landing amid a hum of excited conversation that stopped suddenly. Moll Farrell stood before her hut, limned gauntly against the ghostly dawn, her lean hand pointing seaward. And across the sighing wet sands, borne by the gray tide, something came floating; something that the waves dropped at Moll Farrell's feet. And there looked up at us, as we crowded about, a pair of unseeing eyes set in a still, white face. John Kulrek had come home.

Still and grim he lay, rocked by the tide, and as he lurched sideways, all saw the dagger hilt that stood from his back--the dagger all of us had seen a thousand times at the belt of Lie-lip Canool.

"Aye, I killed him!" came Canool's shriek, as he writhed and groveled before our gaze. "At sea on a still night in a drunken brawl I slew him and hurled him overboard! And from the far seas he has followed me"--his voice sank to a hideous whisper--"because--of--the--curse--the--sea--would--not--keep--his--body!"

And the wretch sank down, trembling, the shadow of the gallows already in his eyes.

"Aye!" Strong, deep and exultant was Moll Farrell's voice. "From the hell of lost craft Satan sent a ship of bygone ages! A ship red with gore and stained with the memory of horrid crimes! None other would bear such a vile carcass! The sea has taken vengeance and has given me mine. See now, how I spit upon the face of John Kulrek."

And with a ghastly laugh, she pitched forward, the blood starting to her lips. And the sun came up across the restless sea.

The Moor Ghost

They haled him to the crossroads

As day was at its close;

They hung him to the gallows

And left him for the crows.

His hands in life were bloody,

His ghost will not be still;

He haunts the naked moorlands

About the gibbet hill.

And oft a lonely traveler

Is found upon the fen

Whose dead eyes hold a horror

Beyond the world of men.

The villagers then whisper,

With accents grim and dour:

"This man has met at midnight

The phantom of the moor."

Moon Mockery

I walked in Tara's Wood one summer night,

And saw, amid the still, star-haunted skies,

A slender moon in silver mist arise,

And hover on the hill as if in fright.

Burning, I seized her veil and held her tight:

An instant all her glow was in my eyes;

Then she was gone, swift as a white bird flies,

And I went down the hill in opal light.

And soon I was aware, as down I came,

That all was strange and new on every side;

Strange people went about me to and fro,

And when I spoke with trembling mine own name

They turned away, but one man said: "He died

In Tara Wood, a hundred years ago."

The Little People

My sister threw down the book she was reading. To be exact, she threw it at me.

"Foolishness!" said she. "Fairy tales! Hand me that copy of Michael Arlen."

I did so mechanically, glancing at the volume which had incurred her youthful displeasure. The story was

"The Shining Pyramid" by Arthur Machen.

"My dear girl," said I, "this is a masterpiece of outre literature."

"Yes, but the idea!" she answered. "I outgrew fairy tales when I was ten."

"This tale is not intended as an exponent of common-day realism," I explained patiently.

"Too far-fetched," she said with the finality of seventeen. "I like to read about things that could happen--who were 'The Little People' he speaks of, the same old elf and troll business?"

"All legends have a base of fact," I said. "There is a reason--"

"You mean to tell me such things actually existed?" she exclaimed. "Rot!"

"Not so fast, young lady," I admonished, slightly nettled. "I mean that all myths had a concrete beginning which was later changed and twisted so as to take on a supernatural significance. Young people," I continued, bending a brotherly frown on her pouting lips, "have a way of either accepting entirely or rejecting entirely such things as they do not understand. The 'Little People' spoken of by Machen are supposed to be descendants of the prehistoric people who inhabited Europe before the Celts came down out of the North.

"They are known variously as Turanians, Picts, Mediterraneans, and Garlic-eaters. A race of small, dark people, traces of their type may be found in primitive sections of Europe and Asia today, among the Basques of Spain, the Scotch of Galloway and the Lapps.

"They were workers in flint and are known to anthropologists as men of the Neolithic or polished stone age. Relics of their age show plainly that they had reached a comparatively high stage of primitive culture by the beginning of the bronze age, which was ushered in by the ancestors of the Celts--our prehistoric tribesmen, young lady.

"These destroyed or enslaved the Mediterranean peoples and were in turn ousted by the Teutonic tribes.

All over Europe, and especially in Britain, the legend is that these Picts, whom the Celts looked upon as scarcely human, fled to caverns under the earth and lived there, coming out only at night, when they would burn, murder, and carry off children for their bloody rites of worship. Doubtless there was much in this theory. Descendants of cave people, these fleeing dwarfs would no doubt take refuge in caverns and no doubt managed to live undiscovered for generations."

"That was a long time ago," she said with slight interest. "If there ever were any of those people they're dead now. Why, we're right in the country where they're supposed to perform and haven't seen any signs of them."

I nodded. My sister Joan did not react to the weird West country as I did. The immense menhirs and cromlechs which rose starkly upon the moors seemed to bring back vague, racial memories, stirring my Celtic imagination.

"Maybe," I said, adding unwisely, "You heard what that old villager said--the warning about walking on the fen at night. No one does it. You're very sophisticated, young lady, but I'll bet you wouldn't spend a night alone in that stone ruin we can see from my window."

Down came her book and her eyes sparkled with interest and combat.

"I'll do it!" she exclaimed. "I'll show you! He did say no one would go near those old rocks at night, didn't he? I will, and stay there the rest of the night!"

She was on her feet instantly and I saw I had made a mistake.

"No, you won't, either," I vetoed. "What would people think?"

"What do I care what they think?" she retorted in the up to date spirit of the Younger Generation.

"You haven't any business out on the moors at night," I answered. "Granting that these old myths are so much empty wind, there are plenty of shady characters who wouldn't hesitate to harm a helpless girl. It's not safe for a girl like you to be out unprotected."

"You mean I'm too pretty?" she asked naively.

"I mean you're too foolish," I answered in my best older brother manner.

She made a face at me and was silent for a moment and I, who could read her agile mind with absurd ease, could tell by her pensive features and sparkling eyes exactly what she was thinking. She was mentally surrounded by a crowd of her cronies back home and I could guess the exact words which she was already framing: "My dears, I spent a whole night in the most romantic old ruin in West England which was supposed to be haunted--"

I silently cursed myself for bringing the subject up when she said abruptly, "I'm going to do it, just the same. Nobody will harm me and I wouldn't pass up the adventure for anything!"

"Joan," I said, "I forbid you to go out alone tonight or any other night."

Her eyes flashed and I instantly wished I had couched my command in more tactful language. My sister was willful and high spirited, used to having her way and very impatient of restraint.

"You can't order me around," she flamed. "You've done nothing but bully me ever since we left America."

"It's been necessary," I sighed. "I can think of a number of pastimes more pleasant than touring Europe with a flapper sister."

Her mouth opened as if to reply angrily then she shrugged her slim shoulders and settled back down in her chair, taking up a book.

"Alright, I didn't want to go much anyhow," she remarked casually. I eyed her suspiciously; she was not usually subdued so easily. In fact some of the most harrowing moments of my life have been those in which I was forced to cajole and coax her out of a rebellious mood.

Nor was my suspicion entirely vanquished when a few moments later she announced her intention of retiring and went to her room just across the corridor.

I turned out the light and stepped over to my window, which opened upon a wide view of the barren, undulating wastes of the moor. The moon was just rising and the land glimmered grisly and stark beneath its cold beams. It was late summer and the air was warm, yet the whole landscape looked cold, bleak and forbidding. Across the fen I saw rise, stark and shadowy, the rough and mighty spires of the ruins.

Gaunt and terrible they loomed against the night, silent phantoms from

[A page appears to be missing from Howard's typescript here.]

she assented with no enthusiasm and returned my kiss in a rather perfunctory manner. Compulsory obedience was repugnant.

I returned to my room and retired. Sleep did not come to me at once however, for I was hurt at my sister's evident resentment and I lay for a long time, brooding and staring at the window, now framed boldly in the molten silver of the moon. At length I dropped into a troubled slumber, through which flitted vague dreams wherein dim, ghostly shapes glided and leered.

I awoke suddenly, sat up and stared about me wildly, striving to orient my muddled senses. An oppressive feeling as of impending evil hovered about me. Fading swiftly as I came to full consciousness, lurked the eery remembrance of a hazy dream wherein a white fog had floated through the window and had assumed the shape of a tall, white bearded man who had shaken my shoulder as if to arouse me from sleep. All of us are familiar with the curious sensations of waking from a bad dream--the dimming and dwindling of partly remembered thoughts and feelings. But the wider awake I became, the stronger grew the suggestion of evil.

I sprang up, snatched on my clothing and rushed to my sister's room, flung open the door. The room was unoccupied.

I raced down the stair and accosted the night clerk who was maintained by the small hotel for some obscure reason.

"Miss Costigan, sir? She came down, clad for outdoors, a while after midnight--about half an hour ago, sir, and said she was going to take a stroll on the moor and not to be alarmed if she did not return at once, sir."

I hurled out of the hotel, my pulse pounding a devil's tattoo. Far out across the fen I saw the ruins, bold and grim against the moon, and in that direction I hastened. At length--it seemed hours--I saw a slim figure some distance in front of me. The girl was taking her time and in spite of her start of me, I was gaining--soon I would be within hearing distance. My breath was already coming in gasps from my exertions but I quickened my pace.

The aura of the fen was like a tangible something, pressing upon me, weighting my limbs--and always that presentiment of evil grew and grew.

Then, far ahead of me, I saw my sister stop suddenly, and look about her confusedly. The moonlight flung a veil of illusion--I could see her but I could not see what had caused her sudden terror. I broke into a run, my blood leaping wildly and suddenly freezing as a wild, despairing scream burst out and sent the moor echoes flying.

The girl was turning first one way and then another and I screamed for her to run toward me; she heard me and started toward me running like a frightened antelope and then I saw. Vague shadows darted about her--short, dwarfish shapes--just in front of me rose a solid wall of them and I saw that they had blocked her from gaining to me. Suddenly, instinctively I believe, she turned and raced for the stone columns, the whole horde after her, save those who remained to bar my path.

I had no weapon nor did I feel the need of any; a strong, athletic youth, I was in addition an amateur boxer of ability, with a terrific punch in either hand. Now all the primal instincts surged redly within me; I was a cave man bent on vengeance against a tribe who sought to steal a woman of my family. I did not fear--I only wished to close with them. Aye, I recognized these--I knew them of old and all the old wars rose and roared within the misty caverns of my soul. Hate leaped in me as in the old days when men of my blood came from the North. Aye, though the whole spawn of Hell rise up from those caverns which honeycomb the moors.

Now I was almost upon those who barred my way; I saw plainly the stunted bodies, the gnarled limbs, the snake-like, beady eyes that stared unwinkingly, the grotesque, square faces with their unhuman features, the shimmer of flint daggers in their crooked hands. Then with a tigerish leap I was among them like a leopard among jackals and details were blotted out in a whirling red haze. Whatever they were, they were of living substance; features crumpled and bones shattered beneath my flailing fists and blood darkened the moon-silvered stones. A flint dagger sank hilt deep in my thigh. Then the ghastly throng broke each way and fled before me, as their ancestors fled before mine, leaving four silent dwarfish shapes stretched on the moor.

Heedless of my wounded leg, I took up the grim race anew; Joan had reached the druidic ruins now and she leaned against one of the columns, exhausted, blindly seeking there protection in obedience to some dim instinct just as women of her blood had done in bygone ages.

The horrid things that pursued her were closing in upon her. They would reach her before I. God knows the thing was horrible enough but back in the recesses of my mind, grimmer horrors were whispering; dream memories wherein stunted creatures pursued white limbed women across such fens as these.

Lurking memories of the ages when dawns were young and men struggled with forces which were not of men.

The girl toppled forward in a faint, and lay at the foot of the towering column in a piteous white heap.

And they closed in--closed in. What they would do I knew not but the ghosts of ancient memory whispered that they would do Something of hideous evil, something foul and grim.

From my lips burst a scream, wild and inarticulate, born of sheer elemental horror and despair. I could not reach her before those fiends had worked their frightful will upon her. The centuries, the ages swept back. This was as it had been in the beginning. And what followed, I know not how to explain--but I think that that wild shriek whispered back down the long reaches of Time to the Beings my ancestors worshipped and that blood answered blood. Aye, such a shriek as could echo down the dusty corridors of lost ages and bring back from the whispering abyss of Eternity the ghost of the only one who could save a girl of Celtic blood.

The foremost of the Things were almost upon the prostrate girl; their hands were clutching for her, when suddenly beside her a form stood. There was no gradual materializing. The figure leaped suddenly into being, etched bold and clear in the moonlight. A tall white bearded man, clad in long robes--the man I had seen in my dream! A druid, answering once more the desperate need of people of his race. His brow was high and noble, his eyes mystic and far-seeing--so much I could see, even from where I ran. His arm rose in an imperious gesture and the Things shrank back--back--back--They broke and fled, vanishing suddenly, and I sank to my knees beside my sister, gathering the child into my arms. A moment I looked up at the man, sword and shield against the powers of darkness, protecting helpless tribes as in the world's youth, who raised his hand above us as if in benediction, then he too vanished suddenly and the moor lay bare and silent.

Dead Man's Hate

They hanged John Farrel in the dawn amid the market-place;

At dusk came Adam Brand to him and spat upon his face.

"Ho, neighbors all," spake Adam Brand, "see ye John Farrel's fate!

'Tis proven here a hempen noose is stronger than man's hate!

"For heard ye not John Farrel's vow to be avenged on me

Come life or death? See how he hangs high on the gallows tree!"

Yet never a word the people spake, in fear and wild surprize--

For the grisly corpse raised up its head and stared with sightless eyes, And with strange motions, slow and stiff, pointed at Adam Brand And clambered down the gibbet tree, the noose within its hand.

With gaping mouth stood Adam Brand like a statue carved of stone, Till the dead man laid a clammy hand hard on his shoulder-bone.

Then Adam shrieked like a soul in hell; the red blood left his face And he reeled away in a drunken run through the screaming market-place; And close behind, the dead man came with face like a mummy's mask, And the dead joints cracked and the stiff legs creaked with their unwonted task.

Men fled before the flying twain or shrank with bated breath, And they saw on the face of Adam Brand the seal set there by death.

He reeled on buckling legs that failed, yet on and on he fled; So through the shuddering market-place, the dying fled the dead.

At the riverside fell Adam Brand with a scream that rent the skies; Across him fell John Farrel's corpse, nor ever the twain did rise.

There was no wound on Adam Brand but his brow was cold and damp, For the fear of death had blown out his life as a witch blows out a lamp.

His lips were writhed in a horrid grin like a fiend's on Satan's coals, And the men that looked on his face that day, his stare still haunts their souls.

Such was the doom of Adam Brand, a strange, unearthly fate; For stronger than death or hempen noose are the fires of a dead man's hate.

The Tavern

There stands, close by a dim, wolf-haunted wood,

A tavern like a monster, brooding thing.

About its sullen gables no birds sing.

Oft a lone traveller, when the moon is blood,

Lights from his horse in quest of sleep and meal.

His footfalls fade within and sound no more;

He comes not forth; but from a secret door

Bearing a grisly burden, shadows steal.

By day, 'neath trees whose silent, green leaves glisten,

The tavern crouches, hating day and light.

A lurking vampire, terrible and lean;

Sometimes behind its windows may be seen

Vague leprous faces, haggard, fungus-white,

That peer and start and ever seem to listen.

Rattle of Bones

"Landlord, ho!" The shout broke the lowering silence and reverberated through the black forest with sinister echoing.

"This place hath a forbidding aspect, meseemeth."

The two men stood in front of the forest tavern. The building was low, long and rambling, built of heavy logs. Its small windows were heavily barred and the door was closed. Above the door its sinister sign showed faintly--a cleft skull.

This door swung slowly open and a bearded face peered out. The owner of the face stepped back and motioned his guests to enter--with a grudging gesture it seemed. A candle gleamed on a table; a flame smoldered in the fireplace.

"Your names?"

"Solomon Kane," said the taller man briefly.

"Gaston l'Armon," the other spoke curtly. "But what is that to you?"

"Strangers are few in the Black Forest," grunted the host, "bandits many. Sit at yonder table and I will bring food."

The two men sat down, with the bearing of men who have traveled far. One was a tall gaunt man, clad in a featherless hat and somber black garments, which set off the dark pallor of his forbidding face. The other was of a different type entirely, bedecked with lace and plumes, although his finery was somewhat stained from travel. He was handsome in a bold way, and his restless eyes shifted from side to side, never still an instant.

The host brought wine and food to the rough-hewn table and then stood back in the shadows, like a somber image. His features, now receding into vagueness, now luridly etched in the firelight as it leaped and flickered, were masked in a beard which seemed almost animal-like in thickness. A great nose curved above this beard and two small red eyes stared unblinkingly at his guests.

"Who are you?" suddenly asked the younger man.

"I am the host of the Cleft Skull Tavern," sullenly replied the other. His tone seemed to challenge his questioner to ask further.

"Do you have many guests?" l'Armon pursued.

"Few come twice," the host grunted.

Kane started and glanced up straight into those small red eyes, as if he sought for some hidden meaning in the host's words. The flaming eyes seemed to dilate, then dropped sullenly before the Englishman's cold stare.

"I'm for bed," said Kane abruptly, bringing his meal to a close. "I must take up my journey by daylight."

"And I," added the Frenchman. "Host, show us to our chambers."

Black shadows wavered on the walls as the two followed their silent host down a long, dark hall. The stocky, broad body of their guide seemed to grow and expand in the light of the small candle which he carried, throwing a long, grim shadow behind him.

At a certain door he halted, indicating that they were to sleep there. They entered; the host lit a candle with the one he carried, then lurched back the way he had come.

In the chamber the two men glanced at each other. The only furnishings of the room were a couple of bunks, a chair or two and a heavy table.

"Let us see if there be any way to make fast the door," said Kane. "I like not the looks of mine host."

"There are racks on door and jamb for a bar," said Gaston, "but no bar."

"We might break up the table and use its pieces for a bar," mused Kane.

"Mon Dieu," said l'Armon, "you are timorous, m'sieu."

Kane scowled. "I like not being murdered in my sleep," he answered gruffly.

"My faith!" the Frenchman laughed. "We are chance met--until I overtook you on the forest road an hour before sunset, we had never seen each other."

"I have seen you somewhere before," answered Kane, "though I can not now recall where. As for the other, I assume every man is an honest fellow until he shows me he is a rogue; moreover I am a light sleeper and slumber with a pistol at hand."

The Frenchman laughed again.

"I was wondering how m'sieu could bring himself to sleep in the room with a stranger! Ha! Ha! All right, m'sieu Englishman, let us go forth and take a bar from one of the other rooms."

Taking the candle with them, they went into the corridor. Utter silence reigned and the small candle twinkled redly and evilly in the thick darkness.

"Mine host hath neither guests nor servants," muttered Solomon Kane. "A strange tavern! What is the name, now? These German words come not easily to me--the Cleft Skull? A bloody name, i'faith."

They tried the rooms next to theirs, but no bar rewarded their search. At last they came to the last room at the end of the corridor. They entered. It was furnished like the rest, except that the door was provided with a small barred opening, and fastened from the outside with a heavy bolt, which was secured at one end to the door-jamb. They raised the bolt and looked in.

"There should be an outer window, but there is not," muttered Kane. "Look!"

The floor was stained darkly. The walls and the one bunk were hacked in places, great splinters having been torn away.

"Men have died in here," said Kane, somberly. "Is yonder not a bar fixed in the wall?"

"Aye, but 'tis made fast," said the Frenchman, tugging at it. "The--"

A section of the wall swung back and Gaston gave a quick exclamation. A small, secret room was revealed, and the two men bent over the grisly thing that lay upon its floor.

"The skeleton of a man!" said Gaston. "And behold, how his bony leg is shackled to the floor! He was imprisoned here and died."

"Nay," said Kane, "the skull is cleft--methinks mine host had a grim reason for the name of his hellish tavern. This man, like us, was no doubt a wanderer who fell into the fiend's hands."

"Likely," said Gaston without interest; he was engaged in idly working the great iron ring from the skeleton's leg bones. Failing in this, he drew his sword and with an exhibition of remarkable strength cut the chain which joined the ring on the leg to a ring set deep in the log floor.

"Why should he shackle a skeleton to the floor?" mused the Frenchman. "Monbleu! 'Tis a waste of good chain. Now, m'sieu," he ironically addressed the white heap of bones, "I have freed you and you may go where you like!"

"Have done!" Kane's voice was deep. "No good will come of mocking the dead."

"The dead should defend themselves," laughed l'Armon. "Somehow, I will slay the man who kills me, though my corpse climb up forty fathoms of ocean to do it."

Kane turned toward the outer door, closing the door of the secret room behind him. He liked not this talk which smacked of demonry and witchcraft; and he was in haste to face the host with the charge of his guilt.

As he turned, with his back to the Frenchman, he felt the touch of cold steel against his neck and knew that a pistol muzzle was pressed close beneath the base of his brain.

"Move not, m'sieu!" The voice was low and silky. "Move not, or I will scatter your few brains over the room."

The Puritan, raging inwardly, stood with his hands in the air while l'Armon slipped his pistols and sword from their sheaths.

"Now you can turn," said Gaston, stepping back.

Kane bent a grim eye on the dapper fellow, who stood bareheaded now, hat in one hand, the other hand leveling his long pistol.

"Gaston the Butcher!" said the Englishman somberly. "Fool that I was to trust a Frenchman! You range far, murderer! I remember you now, with that cursed great hat off--I saw you in Calais some years agone."

"Aye--and now you will see me never again. What was that?"

"Rats exploring yon skeleton," said Kane, watching the bandit like a hawk, waiting for a single slight wavering of that black gun muzzle. "The sound was of the rattle of bones."

"Like enough," returned the other. "Now, M'sieu Kane, I know you carry considerable money on your person. I had thought to wait until you slept and then slay you, but the opportunity presented itself and I took it. You trick easily."

"I had little thought that I should fear a man with whom I had broken bread," said Kane, a deep timbre of slow fury sounding in his voice.

The bandit laughed cynically. His eyes narrowed as he began to back slowly toward the outer door.

Kane's sinews tensed involuntarily; he gathered himself like a giant wolf about to launch himself in a death leap, but Gaston's hand was like a rock and the pistol never trembled.

"We will have no death plunges after the shot," said Gaston. "Stand still, m'sieu; I have seen men killed by dying men, and I wish to have distance enough between us to preclude that possibility. My faith--I will shoot, you will roar and charge, but you will die before you reach me with your bare hands. And mine host will have another skeleton in his secret niche. That is, if I do not kill him myself. The fool knows me not nor I him, moreover--"

The Frenchman was in the doorway now, sighting along the barrel. The candle, which had been stuck in a niche on the wall, shed a weird and flickering light which did not extend past the doorway. And with the suddenness of death, from the darkness behind Gaston's back, a broad, vague form rose up and a gleaming blade swept down. The Frenchman went to his knees like a butchered ox, his brains spilling from his cleft skull. Above him towered the figure of the host, a wild and terrible spectacle, still holding the hanger with which he had slain the bandit.

"Ho! ho!" he roared. "Back!"

Kane had leaped forward as Gaston fell, but the host thrust into his very face a long pistol which he held in his left hand.

"Back!" he repeated in a tigerish roar, and Kane retreated from the menacing weapon and the insanity in the red eyes.

The Englishman stood silent, his flesh crawling as he sensed a deeper and more hideous threat than the Frenchman had offered. There was something inhuman about this man, who now swayed to and fro like some great forest beast while his mirthless laughter boomed out again.

"Gaston the Butcher!" he shouted, kicking the corpse at his feet. "Ho! ho! My fine brigand will hunt no more; I had heard of this fool who roamed the Black Forest--he wished gold and he found death! Now your gold shall be mine; and more than gold--vengeance!"

"I am no foe of yours," Kane spoke calmly.

"All men are my foes! Look--the marks on my wrists! See--the marks on my ankles! And deep in my back--the kiss of the knout! And deep in my brain, the wounds of the years of the cold, silent cells where I lay as punishment for a crime I never committed!" The voice broke in a hideous, grotesque sob.

Kane made no answer. This man was not the first he had seen whose brain had shattered amid the horrors of the terrible Continental prisons.

"But I escaped!" the scream rose triumphantly, "and here I make war on all men.... What was that?"

Did Kane see a flash of fear in those hideous eyes?

"My sorcerer is rattling his bones!" whispered the host, then laughed wildly. "Dying, he swore his very bones would weave a net of death for me. I shackled his corpse to the floor, and now, deep in the night, I hear his bare skeleton clash and rattle as he seeks to be free, and I laugh, I laugh! Ho! ho! How he yearns to rise and stalk like old King Death along these dark corridors when I sleep, to slay me in my bed!"

Suddenly the insane eyes flared hideously: "You were in that secret room, you and this dead fool! Did he talk to you?"

Kane shuddered in spite of himself. Was it insanity or did he actually hear the faint rattle of bones, as if the skeleton had moved slightly? Kane shrugged his shoulders; rats will even tug at dusty bones.

The host was laughing again. He sidled around Kane, keeping the Englishman always covered, and with his free hand opened the door. All was darkness within, so that Kane could not even see the glimmer of the bones on the floor.

"All men are my foes!" mumbled the host, in the incoherent manner of the insane. "Why should I spare any man? Who lifted a hand to my aid when I lay for years in the vile dungeons of Karlsruhe--and for a deed never proven? Something happened to my brain, then. I became as a wolf--a brother to these of the Black Forest to which I fled when I escaped.

"They have feasted, my brothers, on all who lay in my tavern--all except this one who now clashes his bones, this magician from Russia. Lest he come stalking back through the black shadows when night is over the world, and slay me--for who may slay the dead?--I stripped his bones and shackled him. His sorcery was not powerful enough to save him from me, but all men know that a dead magician is more evil than a living one. Move not, Englishman! Your bones I shall leave in this secret room beside this one, to--"

The maniac was standing partly in the doorway of the secret room, now, his weapon still menacing Kane.

Suddenly he seemed to topple backward, and vanished in the darkness; and at the same instant a vagrant gust of wind swept down the outer corridor and slammed the door shut behind him. The candle on the wall flickered and went out. Kane's groping hands, sweeping over the floor, found a pistol, and he straightened, facing the door where the maniac had vanished. He stood in the utter darkness, his blood freezing, while a hideous muffled screaming came from the secret room, intermingled with the dry, grisly rattle of fleshless bones. Then silence fell.

Kane found flint and steel and lighted the candle. Then, holding it in one hand and the pistol in the other, he opened the secret door.

"Great God!" he muttered as cold sweat formed on his body. "This thing is beyond all reason, yet with mine own eyes I see it! Two vows have here been kept, for Gaston the Butcher swore that even in death he would avenge his slaying, and his was the hand which set yon fleshless monster free. And he--"

The host of the Cleft Skull lay lifeless on the floor of the secret room, his bestial face set in lines of terrible fear; and deep in his broken neck were sunk the bare fingerbones of the sorcerer's skeleton.