Абрахам Меррит - Seven Footprints To Satan

There was a hint of grimness in his voice. I grinned to myself, well pleased. There was good hard metal in the little man. It was a challenge he was throwing down to me, of course. I looked at my watch.

"Twenty after eleven," I said. "So that you keep a certain appointment at midnight- lead on, MacDuff."

"Your shirt," he said, "would look like a light'ouse in the dark. Put on another suit."

I changed rapidly into the most unobtrusive of the wardrobe's contents.

"Got a gun?" he asked.

I nodded, pointing to my left armpit. I had replenished my personal arsenal, of which Consardine had deprived me, while at the Club.

"Throw it in a drawer," he bade me, surprisingly.

"What's the idea?" I asked.

"No good," he said, "you might be tempted to use it, Cap'n."

"Well, for God's sake," I said, "if I was, there would be good reason."

"Might just as well carry along an alarm clock," said Barker. "Do you just as much good, Or 'arm. Mostly 'arm. We don't exactly want no h'advertisin' on this trip, Cap'n."

My respect for Harry took an abrupt upward swing. I dropped my gun into the casual mouth of a nearby vase. I unslung my armpit holster, and poked it under a pillow.

"Get thee behind me, Temptation," I said. "And now what?"

He dipped into a pocket.

"Sneakers," said Barker, and handed me a pair of thick rubber soles. I slipped them over my shoes. He fumbled in another pocket.

"Knucks," he dropped a beautiful pair of brass knuckles in my hand. I thrust my fingers through them.

"Good," said Barker. "They ain't got the range of a gun, but if we 'ave to get violent we'll 'ave to see it's quiet like. Get up close an' 'it 'ard an' quick."

"Let's go," I said.

He snapped off the lights in the outer room. He returned, moving with absolute silence, and took my hand. He led me to the bedroom wall.

"Put your 'and on my shoulder, an' step right be'ind me," he ordered. I had heard no sound of a panel, and could distinguish no opening in the blackness. But a panel had opened, for I walked through what a moment before had been solid wall. He halted, no doubt closing the aperture. He swung off at a right-angle, I following. I had counted fifty paces before he stopped again. The corridor was a long one. He flashed a light, brief as the blink of a firefly. Before me was one of the little lifts. He pressed my arm, and guided me in. The lift began to drop. He drew a faint sigh, as of relief.

"There was dynger along there," he whispered. "Now it'll be fair clear goin'!"

The descent of the elevator seemed very slow. When it stopped, I was sure that we must be well below the floor of the great hall, somewhere down among the foundations.

"What we're goin' into is one of 'is private wyes," again he whispered. "I don't think even Consardine knows it. An' we won't meet Satan on it. 'Cause why? I'm goin' to show you."

We slipped out of the lift, and crossed what was apparently a ten-foot wide corridor, black as a windowless dungeon. We passed, I conjectured, through its opposite wall, and along another passage of eighteen short paces. Here Barker paused, listening.

Then in front of me a hair line of faint light appeared. Slowly, ever so slowly, it widened. Barker's head became silhouetted against it. Cautiously he advanced, peering out. Then he nodded, reassuringly. He moved forward.

We were in a dimly lighted, narrow corridor. It was hardly wide enough for two men to walk side by side. It was lined and paved with some polished black stone into which the light, from some hidden source, seemed to sink and drown. We were at one end of it. The floor fell in a gradual ramp for a hundred yards or more, and there the way either ceased or curved, the light was so faint and the effect of the polished stone so confusing I could not tell which.

"Looks like a h'alley into 'Ell, don't it?" muttered Harry. "Well, in a minute or two try to sye it ain't."

He set grimly forth down it, I at his heels. We came to the part that had perplexed me, and I saw that it was a curve, a sharp one. The curve was unlighted, its darkness relieved only by faint reflections from behind. I could not see its end. We moved on into the thickening gloom. The floor had become level.

Suddenly Barker halted, his mouth close to my ear.

"Lay down. Not a sound now when you look in. On your life! Don't 'ardly breathe!"

I looked through the crack. I felt a cold prickling along my spine and in the roots of my hair.

A little below me and not more than fifty feet away sat Satan. And he was opening the gates of his Black Paradise to the dying souls of his kehjt slaves!

The meaning of the scene struck clear with my first glimpse of it. Satan was leaning forward from a massive throne of heavy black stone cushioned in scarlet and standing on a low broad dais. His robes were scarlet. At his side squatted the ape-faced monstrosity of an executioner, Sanchal. At his left hand stood two figures with veiled faces. One of them held a deep ewer, and the other a golden goblet.

At Satan's feet was a woman, rising from her knees. She was not old, fair haired, and must once have been very beautiful. Her body, seen through the one white robe that was her only covering, was still so. Her wide eyes were fixed with a dreadful avidness upon another golden goblet in Satan's hand. Her mouth was half open, her lips drawn tight against her teeth. Her body quivered and strained as though she were about to leap upon him.

The executioner whirred the loop of his cord, and grinned. She shrank back. Satan lifted the goblet high. His voice rolled out, sonorous and toneless.

"You, woman who was Greta von Bohnheim, who am I?"

She answered as tonelessly.

"You are Satan."

"And what am I, Satan?"

She replied:

"You are my God!"

I felt Barker shudder. Well, I was doing a little shivering myself. The infernal litany went on.

"You shall have no God but me!"

"I have no God but you, Satan!"

"What is it, woman, that is your desire?"

Her hands were clenched, and she drew them up to her heart. Her voice was tremulous, and so low that barely could I hear it.

"A man and a child who are dead!"

"Through me they shall live again for you! Drink!"

There was faint mockery in his voice, and derision in his eyes, as he handed the goblet to the woman. She clutched it in both hands, and drained it. She bowed low, and walked away. She passed out of the narrow range of my vision, stepping ever more firmly, face rapt, lips moving as though she talked with one unseen who walked beside her.

Again I felt the cold creep down my back. In what I had beheld there had been something diabolic, something that truly savored of the Prince of the Damned. It betrayed itself in Satan's cold arrogance and pride during the blasphemous litany. It was in his face, his glittering eyes, and in the poise of his huge body. Something truly of Hell that possessed him, emanated from him, hovered around him. As though, as once before I have tried to describe it, as though he were a mechanism of flesh and blood in which a demon had housed itself.

My gaze followed the woman until I could see her no more. The chamber was immense. What I could see of it through the crack must have been less than a third of it. The walls were of rose marble, without hangings or ornamentation of any kind. There were pierced openings like the mouths of deep niches over which silvery curtains fell. There was a great fountain that sent up tinkling jets of water out of a blood-red bowl. Couches of the rosy stone were scattered about. They were richly covered and on them lay, as though sleeping, men and women. There must have been dozens of these, for there were a score of them within my limited vision alone. I could not see the roof.

I thought that these curtained apertures might be cubicles or cells in which the slaves dwelt.