The Jailer of Souls (continued 2)

In a bare cell, six feet by six—a cubicle in which there was barely sufficient head room for a tall man to stand upright—a figure stood with its hands clenched upon the bars, staring outward at the grim wood visible to the south.

Travis Annister had abode here in this living tomb three weeks now, three centuries, in which, as in a nightmare of cold horror, he had been aware merely of a face, three-pointed, bearded, the eyes active with a malign intelligence, the lips smiling always with the cold smile of death.

Twice a day the small panel in his cell door had slid backward without sound, to frame, in the opening, the face of Dr. Elphinstone, like a face without a body, and without a soul.

The father of Black Steve Annister knew that it was not a dream that would pass, because, on the second day, the head had spoken. Travis Annister was scarcely a coward; he had fought like a baited grizzly when surprised in his Summer camp by the men who had brought him, under cover of the night, to this prison-house beyond the pale.

Now, at the voice, like the slow drip of an acid, Annister stared straight before him, with the gaze of a man who has abandoned hope.

“My dear Mr. Annister,” the voice had whispered, “the little matter of that check, if you please.... You will make it out to ‘Cash’.... Ah, that is good; I perceive you are—wise.”

It had not been the pistol in the lean, clawlike hand; nor the eyes, even, brooding upon him with the impersonal, cold staring of a cobra; Travis Annister might have refused if it had not been for those sounds that he had heard, the sights that he had seen when, taken at midnight from his cubicle, he had beheld the administration of the Cone.

And, like Macbeth, with that one sight, and the sight of that which came after, he had “supped full of horrors,” until now, at the bidding of that toneless voice, he had obeyed. Three times thereafter, at the command of his dark jailer, he had paid tribute, nor had he been, of all that lost battalion, the single victim; there had been others....

Now, separated from him scarce a dozen feet, a girl with golden hair sat, huddled, eyes in a sightless staring upon the stone floor of her cell. Cleo Ridgley had not been killed; she had been saved for a fate—beside which death would be a little thing—a fate unspeakable, even as had—Number Thirty-three.

Mary Allerton, removed from the others by a narrow corridor running cross-wise in the cell-block, watched and waited now for the signal of the man to whom she had dispatched that message, it seemed, a century in the past.

That morning they had found the rope; they had removed it without comment, while the ophidian gaze of the dark Doctor had been bent upon her with what she fancied had been a queer, speculative look: a look of anticipation, and of something more. So far she had been treated decently enough; her cell was wide and airy, plainly but comfortably furnished; but as to that look in the gray-green eyes of the Master of Black Magic—she was not so sure.

There came a sudden movement in the corridor without; a panting, a snuffling, and the quick pad-pad of marching feet. Mary, her eye to the keyhole of that door, could see but dimly; she made out merely the sheeted figures, like grim, gliding ghosts; the figure, rigid, on the stretcher, moving, silent, on its rubber-tired wheels. Then, at an odor stealing inward through the key-hole, she recoiled.

That perfume had been sickish-sweet, overpowering, dense and yet sharp with a faint, acrid sweetness; the odor of ether. And then, although she could not see it, a man in the next cell had risen, white-faced, from his cot, to sink back limply as the dark hand, holding that inverted cone, had swept downward to his face.

A choked gurgle, a strangled, sharp cry, penetrating outward in a vague shadow of clamor—and then silence, with the faint whisper of the wind among the pines, the brool of the rushing river, the faint, half-audible footfalls passing and repassing in that corridor of the dead.

Travis Annister sprang to his feet as the narrow door swung open to press backward against the window-bars as the High-Priest of Horror, followed by his familiars, cowled and hooded, entered with a slow, silent step. The Doctor spoke, and his voice was like a chill wind:

“My friend, I bring you—forgetfulness.... A brief Lethe of hours.... And then—ah, then, you will be a new man, a man re-born, my friend.... Now....”

Annister, his face gray with a sort of hideous strain, stared silent, white-lipped, as, at a low-voiced order, the attendants came forward.

The lean hand reached forward; it poised, darted, swooped; and in it was the Cone.

CHAPTER TWELVE CASTLE DANGEROUS

Alone in his cell beneath the court-house, Black Steve Annister sat in silence, gazing northward through the barred window to where, invisible in the thick darkness just across the street, the road ran, straight as an arrow from the bow, to that dark forest brooding in a changeless silence where lay the House of Fear.

Childers would have had his wire long since; but by the time that help could come it would be—too late. Annister, fatalistic after a fashion, felt this to be the fact even as he hoped against hope.

But they were many, and he was but one. Tomorrow—it would be too late.

Head bowed in his hands, oblivious, at first he had heard it as a thin whisper, like a knife blade against the silence; it penetrated inward now, with the dull rasp of metal upon metal from without:

“Sit tight, old-timer; I’m comin’ through!”

There came a muffled thud, a twist; Annister, reaching forth a hand, found it clasped in thick groping fingers. Then, as he thrust head and shoulders through the sundered bars, a Shadow uprose, gigantic, against the stars; the voice came again, in a quick, rumbling whisper:

“It’s me, old-timer—Bull.”

Annister, crawling through the opening, alighted upon soft turf. He heard Ellison’s low chuckle as, following the giant, he passed along the lee of the building to where, showing merely as a black blot against the night, there stood an automobile, its engine just turning over, with the low, even purr of harnessed power; at twenty paces it was scarcely audible above the rising of the wind.

“Tank’s full,” said Ellison. “Now—”

He turned abruptly as a dim figure rose upward just beyond. For a moment Annister set himself for the onslaught; then his hand went out; it gripped the hard hand of Del Kane.

“Ellison done told me, Mr. Annister,” he said. “An’ so I come a-fannin’ an’ a-foggin’ thisaway from Mojave; certain-sure I don’t aim to leave no friend of mine hog-tied in no calaboose!”

Annister, his heart warming to these friends, debated with himself; then turned to Ellison with a sudden movement.

“Bull,” he said. “I’m putting my cards on the table with you and Del, here.”

He told them briefly of the message from Mary, the need of haste; then, of his mission, and of the help that was even now due, or would be, with the morning. If they were coming with him, northward along that road of peril, word must be left behind.

Kane thought a moment; then, wheeling swiftly, with muttered word, he disappeared in the darkness, to return presently with the good news that he had fixed it with the station-agent. The latter had just come on; he was a friend of Kane’s, and no friend of Rook and Company; he would see to it, Kane said, that the reinforcements would be warned.

Boarding the car, they swung out cautiously along the silent street, under the pale stars, northward along that shadowy road. Presently there would be a moon, but just now they went onward in a thick darkness, with, just ahead, the dim loom of the road, flowing backward under the wheels, which presently ran like a ribbon of pale flame under the bright beam of the lights.

A half mile from the town, and Bull, who was driving, opened up, and the car leaped forward with the rising drone of the powerful motor, thirty, forty, fifty miles an hour; the wind of their passage drove backward like a wall as the giant’s voice came now in a rumbling laugh:

“Some little speed-wagon, Mr. Annister, ha?” he said. “An’ that’s whatever! It ought to be. The man who owns it—who did own it half an hour ago—he’s some particular, I’ll say! Because—it’s Mister Hamilton Rook’s!”

Annister laughed grimly in answer, speaking a low word of caution as, after perhaps a half hour of their racing onrush the lights glimmered on dark trees to right and left.

“Somewhere about here, I think,” he said, low. “Three outside guards, I understand. We’d better stop a little way this side, Bull ... that’s it. Now, look!”

As the big car slid slowly to a halt, the moon, rising above the trees, showed them, perhaps a hundred yards just ahead, a low, rambling, stone house, its windows like blind eyes to the night. Upon its roof the moonlight lay like snow, and even at that distance it was sinister, forbidding, as if the evil that was within had seeped through those stones, outward, in a creeping tide.

“Looks like a morgue,” offered Ellison, with a shrug of his great shoulders, as the three, alighting, pushed the car before them into the wood.

Then, guns out, they went forward slowly among the trees.

Annister had formed no definite plan of attack. The red ribbon at that window-bar might or might not be visible under the moon, but, the guards eliminated, it seemed to him that, after all, they would have to make it an assault in force. Pondering this matter, of a sudden he leaped sidewise as a dim figure rose upward almost in his face.

Spread-eagled like a bat against the dimness, the figure bulked, huge, against the moon as Annister, bending to one side, brought up his fist in a lifting punch, from his shoe-tops.

It was a savage blow; it landed with the sound of a butcher’s cleaver on the chopping-block; there came a gasping grunt; the thud of a heavy body, as the guard went downward without a sound.

“One!” breathed Ellison, as, trussing their victim with a length of stout line brought from the car, they left him, going forward carefully, keeping together, circling the house.

But it was not until they were half way round it, with, so far, no sign of that signal for which he looked, that they encountered the second guard.

He came upon them with a swift, silent onrush, leaping among the trees, a great, dun shape, spectral under the moon, fangs bared, as, without a sound, the hound drove straight for the giant’s throat.

A shot would bring discovery; they dared not risk it. Annister could see the great head, the wide ruff at the neck, the grinning jaws.... Then, the giant’s hands had gone up and out; there came a straining heave, a wrench, a queer, whistling croak; Ellison, rising from his knees, looked downward a moment to where the beast, its jaw broken by that mighty strength, lay stretched, lifeless, at his feet.

By now they had come full circle, when, all at once, Annister, peering under his hand, sucked in his breath with a whispered oath.

Fair against the bars of a window, low down at their right, there was a dark smudge; the ribbon, black under the moon. Annister’s heart leaped up in answer, as, with a quick word, he halted his companions in the shadow of a tree. A moment they conferred; then Ellison—and Annister could almost see his grin in the darkness—spoke beneath his hand:

“Why, that’ll be easy! I’ve got m’ tools; they’re right here in my pocket, Mr. Annister! Those bars ought to be easy! For a fair journeyman sledge-swinger, it’ll be easy an’ you can lay to that!”

“Good!” whispered Annister in answer. “But—hurry!”

The moonlight lay in a molten flood between them and the house. But it was no time now for deliberation. Crossing that bright strip at a crouching run, the three were at the window; Annister’s harsh whisper hissed in the silence, through those iron bars:

“Mary!”

For a heart-beat silence answered him; then, faint and thin, in a faint, tremulous, sobbing breath, there came the answer:

“Steve—thank God!”

Annister had spoken the girl’s name without thought. At that high moment forms had been futile; that whisper had been wrung from him, deep-down, as had her answer. And then the soft rasp of steel on steel told that Ellison was at work.

But the giant was working against time. At any moment now might come the alarm; they had no means of knowing the number of those within those walls; perhaps even now peril, just behind, might be stalking them, out of the dark.

And still that soft rasp went on, until, at a low word from the girl, the giant, laying down his file, bent, heaved, putting his shoulder into it; and the bars sprang outward, bent and twisted in that iron grasp.

Annister, his hand reaching for the hand of the girl, went inward silently, to stand a moment, without speech, in the thick darkness of the little cell. But it was no time for dalliance.

Kane and Ellison behind him now, he set his shoulder against the door, as, Ellison aiding, it splintered outward with a soft, carrying crash. Ahead of them, along a dark, narrow corridor, there had come on a sudden sound of voices, murmurs; Annister, going toward that sound, saw suddenly an open door; light streamed from it as the murmur of voices rose:

“My friend, I bring you—forgetfulness....”

The words came in a sort of hissing sibilance as Annister, reaching that doorway, halted a moment as the tableau was burned into his brain:

He saw his father, helpless, his face gray with the hideous terror of that which was upon him, in the grasp of two cloaked and hooded figures, their dark faces grinning with a bestial mirth.

And before him, hand upraised and holding a curious, funnel-shaped object at which the man in the corner shrank backward even as he looked, he saw a tall man with a black, forking beard—the same that he had seen that evening at the corner of the street; the same that he had seen in that dim backwater of Rangoon, the Unspeakable—the man with the dark, foreign visage, and the eyes of death.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE JAILER OF SOULS

Annister’s gun went up and out as the black-bearded man, turning, saw him where he stood.

Travis Annister, parchment-pale, took two forward, lurching steps, as the doctor, backing stiffly against the wall, hands upraised, called something in a high sing-song, savage, inarticulate.

Then—everything seemed to happen at once. A snarling, animal outcry echoed from the passage just without; it rose, as there came a far, gobbling mutter of voices, and the pad-pad of running feet.

The hooded Familiars, as one man, turned, and the long knives flashed, luminous, under the lights, as Kane and Ellison, meeting them half way, raised their heavy guns.

Annister, covering the Doctor, froze suddenly in motion as that gobbling horror mounted, and then, filling that narrow way like figures in a dream, they came: the outcasts, the lost battalion, the Men Who Had no Right to Live.

In their van, but running rather as if pursued than as if in answer to that snarling call, there came three men, guards by their dress, their faces contorted, agonized, upon them the impress of a crawling fear. They streamed past that door, pursuers and pursued, as Black Steve Annister, finger upon the trigger of his pistol, saw that lean hand sweep upward; it flicked the thin lips; the dark face grayed, went blank; the Dark Doctor, his gaze in a queer, frozen look upon Eternity, pitched forward upon his face.

In some way, as Annister could understand, the madmen had won free, but—how?

Turning, he saw a white face at his elbow as there sounded from without the staccato explosions of a motor, and a swift, hammering thunder upon the great door.

“I am—Newbold Humiston,” said the face, “and I am not mad, or, rather, I am but mad north-north-west when the wind is southerly,” he quoted, with a ghastly smile. “This devil—” he pointed to the body of Elphinstone—“has gone to his own place, but the evil that he did lives after him—in us.”

His voice rose to a shriek as there came a rush of feet along the corridor: a compact body of men, at their head a tall man at sight of whom Stephen Annister flung up a hand.

“Well, Childers,” he said. “I’m glad!”

Childers spoke pantingly, in quick gasps:

“We just made it, old man,” he said. “A day ahead at that. The station agent put us on the track. We got ’em all—Lunn, and the rest; all but Rook—”

He paused, at Annister’s inquiring look, turning his thumb down with an expressive gesture.

“We found him—strangled—in his office ... a queer business....”

Annister gave an exclamation.

“The Indian!” he said. “Well, Rook was the ‘Third Light,’ sure enough!”

Again he was seeing the lean, avid face in the vestibule of the smoker, the lighted match; himself, and the conductor, and Rook, the lawyer’s pale eyes brooding above the glowing end of his cigarette.... And again, as the picture passed, he was aware of the white face at his elbow as Mary Allerton, her hand in his, behind her the golden hair and the wide eyes of Cleo Ridgley, turned to Childers with a smile that yet had in it a hint of tears.

He that had been Newbold Humiston continued:

“The others—they’re quiet now. The guards have gone—to follow him—the others saw to that.”

He gestured toward the silent figure on the floor.

“His plan was worthy of his master, the Devil, because it was diabolically simple: Rook was his procurer and his clearing-house; you see, Rook found the victims, and cashed the checks that Elphinstone wrung from them; and then, when they had cleaned up, or when they deemed the time was ripe, the victims—disappeared. Rook’s secretary they kidnapped for revenge; Miss Allerton because she knew much; they suspected that she was in the Secret Service. And so—these others disappeared.”

He laughed; the laugh of a dead man risen from the tomb.

“They disappeared—yes—but—they remained, as you see—myself—a living ghost!”

“But how?” asked the younger Annister, in the sudden quiet, the realization of what his father and Mary had escaped burning like a quick fire in his veins. The toneless voice went on:

“Elphinstone was a surgeon, a master.... You’ve heard of Dermatology? Well, it’s been done in India, I believe; practiced there to an extent unknown here, of course. An anesthetic, and then an operation: new faces for old, forged faces; the thing was diabolically simple. And so when they, the victims, saw themselves in a mirror, sometimes they went mad, for who could prove it? Who would be believed?”

His voice rose, died, gathered strength, as a candle flames at the last with a brief spark of life:

“It’s done,” he muttered. “He’s gone—but his work lives after him, even as he called himself—the Jailer of Souls!”

THE END.