Robert Chambers - The Slayer Of souls

"Victor!" she gasped, "clear your mind in the name of God!"

"I can not―"

"I tell you hell is opening beyond that door!—outside your bolted door, there! Can't you believe me! Can't you hear me! Oh, what will hold you if the love of God can not!" she burst out. "I'd crucify myself for you if you'd look at me—if you'd only fight hard enough to believe in me—as though you loved me!"

His eyes unclosed but he sank back against her shoulder.

"Victor!" she cried in a terrible voice.

There was no answer.

"If the love of God could only hold you for a moment more!"—she stammered with her mouth against his ear, "just for a moment, Victor! Can't you hear me?"

"Yes—very far away."

"Fight for me! Try to care for me! Don't let Sanang have me!"

He shuddered in her arms, reached out and resting heavily on her shoulder, staggered to his feet and stood swaying like a drunken man.

"No, by God," he said thickly, "Sanang shall not touch you."

The girl was on her feet now, holding him upright with an arm around his shoulders.

"They can't—can't harm us together," she stammered. "Hark! Listen! Can you hear? Oh, can you hear?"

"Give me my pistol," he tried to say, but his tongue seemed twisted. "No—by God—Sanang shall not touch you."

She stooped lithely and recovered the weapon. "Hush," she said close to his burning face. "Listen. Our minds are safe! I can hear somebody's soul bidding its body farewell!"

White–lipped she burst out laughing, kicked the shroud out of the way, thrust the pistol into his right hand, went forward, forcing him along beside her, and drew the bolts from the door.

Suddenly he spoke distinctly:

"Is there anything outside that door on the landing?"

"Yes…. I don't know what. Are you ready?" She laid her hand on lock and knob.

He nodded. At the same instant she jerked open the door; and a hunchback who had been picking at the lock fell headlong into the room, his pistol exploding on the carpet in a streak of fire.

It was a horrible struggle to secure the powerful misshapen creature, for he clawed and squealed and bounced about on the floor, striking blindly with ape–like arms. But at last Cleves held him down, throttled and twitching, and Tressa ripped strips from the shroud to truss up the writhing thing.

Then Cleves switched on the light.

"Why—why—you rat!" he exclaimed in hysterical relief at seeing a living man whom he recognised there at his feet. "What are you doing here?"

The hunchback's red eyes blazed up at him from the floor.

"Who—who is he?" faltered the girl.

"He's a German tailor named Albert Feke—one of the Chicago Bolsheviki—the most dangerous sort we harbour—one of their vile leaders who preaches that might is right and tells his disciples to go ahead and take what they want."

He looked down at the malignant cripple.

"You're wanted for the I. W. W. bomb murder, Albert. Did you know it?"

The hunchback licked his bloody lips. Then he kicked himself to a sitting position, squatted there like a toad and looked steadily at Tressa Norne out of small red–rimmed eyes. Blood dripped on his beard; his huge hairy fists, tied and crossed behind his back, made odd, spasmodic movements.

Cleves went to the telephone. Presently Tressa heard his voice, calm and distinct as usual:

"We've caught Albert Feke. He's here at my rooms. I'd like to have you come over, Recklow…. Oh, yes, he kicked and scuffled and scratched like a cat…. What?…No, I hadn't heard that he'd been in China…. Who?…Albert Feke? You say he was one of the Germans who escaped from Shantung four years ago?…You think he's a Yezidee! You mean one of the Eight Assassins?"

The hunchback, staring at Tressa out of red–rimmed eyes, suddenly snarled and lurched his misshapen body at her.

"Teufelstuck!" he screamed, "ain't I tell efferybody in Yian already it iss safer if we cut your throat! Devil–slut of Erlik—snow–leopardess!—cat of the Yezidees who has made of Sanang a fool!—it iss I who haf said always, always, that you know too damn much!…Kai!…I hear my soul bidding me farewell. Gif me my shroud!"

Cleves came back from the telephone. With the toe of his left foot he lifted the shroud and kicked it across the hunchback's knees.

"So you were one of the huns who instigated the massacre in Yian," he said, curiously. At that Tressa turned very white and a cry escaped her.

But the hunchback's features were all twisted into ferocious laughter, and he beat on the carpet with the heels of his great splay feet.

"Ja! Ja!" he shrieked, "in Yian it vas a goot hunting! English and Yankee men und vimmens ve haff dropped into dose deep wells down. Py Gott in Himmel, how dey schream up out of dose deep wells in Yian!" He began to cackle and shriek in his frenzy. "Ach Gott ja! It iss not you either—you there, Keuke Mongol, who shall escape from the Sheiks–el–Djebel! It iss dot Old Man of the Mountain who shall tell your soul it iss time to say farewell! Ja! Ja! Ach Gott!—it iss my only regret that I shall not see the world when it is all afire! Ja! Ja!—all on fire like hell! But you shall see it, slut–leopard of the snows! You shall see it und you shall burn! Kai! Kai! My soul it iss bidding my body farewell. Kai! May Erlik curse you, Keuke Mongol—Heavenly Azure—Sorceress of the temple!—"

He spat at her and rolled over in his shroud.

The girl looking down on him closed her eyes for a moment, and Cleves saw her bloodless lips move, and bent nearer, listening. And he heard her whispering to herself:

"Preserve us all, O God, from the wrath of Satan who was stoned."

Over the United States stretched an unseen network of secret intrigue woven tirelessly night and day by the busy enemies of civilisation—Reds, parlour–socialists, enemy–aliens, terrorists, Bolsheviki, pseudo–intellectuals, I. W. W.'s, social faddists, and amateur meddlers of every nuance—all the various varieties of the vicious, witless, and mentally unhinged—brought together through the "cohesive power of plunder" and the degeneration of cranial tissue.

All over the United States the various departmental divisions of the Secret Service were busily following up these threads of intrigue leading everywhere through the obscurity of this vast and secret maze.

To meet the constantly increasing danger of physical violence and to uncover secret plots threatening sabotage and revolution, there were capable agents in every branch of the Secret Service, both Federal and State.

But in the first months of 1919 something more terrifying than physical violence suddenly threatened civilised America,—a wild, grotesque, incredible threat of a war on human minds !

And, little by little, the United States Government became convinced that this ghastly menace was no dream of a disordered imagination, but that it was real: that among the enemies of civilisation there actually existed a few powerful but perverted minds capable of wielding psychic forces as terrific weapons: that by the sinister use of psychic knowledge controlling these mighty forces the very minds of mankind could be stealthily approached, seized, controlled and turned upon civilisation to aid in the world's destruction.

In terrible alarm the Government turned to England for advice. But Sir William Crookes was dead.

However, in England, Sir Conan Doyle immediately took up the matter, and in America Professor Hyslop was called into consultation.

And then, when the Government was beginning to realise what this awful menace meant, and that there were actually in the United States possibly half a dozen people who already had begun to carry on a diabolical warfare by means of psychic power, for the purpose of enslaving and controlling the very minds of men,—then, in the terrible moment of discovery, a young girl landed in America after fourteen years' absence in Asia.