Priestess of Murder (4 page)

Calban's protest was a grisly roar blasting through the black forest
aisles. The huge arms bent, slowly, reluctantly, letting Stan down.

The trooper twisted abruptly, freed himself from Calban's loosening grip.
He thudded to the ground, sprang erect, snarling...

But the monster was gone, had plunged away into the veiling thickets. For
minutes the lovers heard the threshing of his huge, evil body moving away,
and then a sinister silence close about them. A silence sinister because it
cloaked not only the ravening man-beast, but another mysterious entity, a
lurking, invisible being who was master of the Monster, whose whistling
command the brute obeyed even in the height of his frenzy. Twice Leila had
heard the weird whistle, twice it had saved her.

Not her, but Stan!
It had been at Stan's approach that the ravening
human hound had been called away that first time, it had been Stan whose
deadly peril had just now been averted. If it were not for Stan—

"God!" the youth groaned. "Who is he? Where did he come from?" He pulled a
trembling hand across his bruised forehead above his glazed, unseen eyes,
swayed with exhaustion. "Why did he quit, just when he was about to slam me
down and break every bone in my body?"

Leila struggled out of the tangling bush into which Calban had flung her.
"I don't know, Stan." She was cold, icy cold with foreboding, with
realization of a terrible enmity focused upon herself. I—"

Her throat damped as Stan pitched forward, pounded limply down, lay sodden
and unconscious in spongy, water-soaked loam.

Leila lurched to him. Her hand flew to a dark, spreading stain on his
shirt, found warm, viscid wetness. It was blood! His blood! But Calban had no
knife...

Moaning, the girl tore the shirt-stuff away with trembling fingers. The
angling wound across his ribs from which the gory, angry fluid gushed was no
knife-dash. It was the jagged-edged path of a bullet, and under the fresh,
scarlet pour was the mass of an old clot.

Leila ripped a hasty bandage from the tatters to which her own frock had
been reduced, worked frantically to stanch that grisly flow. And as she
worked a vague explanation of what had happened formed in her mind.

His mad father's bullet had ploughed across Stan's ribs, had flung him
down, unconscious at the foot of the stairs. The slow seepage had stopped
itself. He had come awake. Hearing what he thought was Leila running out of
the house he had followed. His exertions, the battle with the ape-faced
monster, had opened the wound afresh. Weakened by the new loss of blood he
had fainted once more.

Now he lay here, unconscious, in the black depths of the forest. He lay
here, and she with him, and somewhere in the glimmering, ominous shadows
Calban still roved and...

Leila's neck prickled abruptly, with the sense of eyes upon her, of
glaring, hostile eyes. Leaves rustled, stealthily. She crouched low over
Stan's senseless form, throwing the frail protection of her slight body
athwart him, and quivered with the knowledge that out of the murk her enemy
was creeping silently to leap upon her and destroy her.

To leap upon her! It was she, Leila Monroy, the unseen adversary
threatened, not Stan! Stan's danger lay only in that she was with him. Twice
that had been proved. If she could lead the chase away from Stan...

She leaped from her lover's recumbent form.

"Come and get me," she cried, and was hurtling once more through the
lashing, tearing brambles of the woods. Was running headlong and blindly
through the shadowed aisles, not knowing where she ran, not caring so long as
it was away from Stan, so long as she led the destroyer away from the man she
loved.

The forest crashed into sudden life behind her. Some one was following
her, was flinging after her a hollow, echoing shout. Its threat spurred her
to renewed efforts.

Despairing, frantic, the gasping, fear-goaded girl catapulted through the
tearing brambles, crashed into stunning tree-trunks, caromed off and ran
on.

And then, quite suddenly, Leila was out of the forest. She was running
down a wet but grass-soft slope, and before her, across the familiar pasture,
was the yellow-windowed bulk of her own house, black against a sky tinted by
the haunting gray of false dawn.

Almost at once she was in her own back yard, was leaping up the back-porch
steps, was tugging at the knob of a friendly kitchen door. It resisted her
efforts. It would not open. She gasped, remembering that she had herself
locked it from the inside.

Unhoped for safety, tantalizingly offered at the last moment, was snatched
away. Leila whirled to meet the fate from which she had fled.

Silver of the setting moon sluiced an empty field. No one, nothing, was
there. She had outdistanced her invisible pursuer, had left him behind in the
forest.

Or had he fooled her as she had thought to fool him? Had he left her
fleeing blindly through the woods while he turned back to pounce upon and
destroy the lover she had planned to save by her rejected sacrifice?

Something moved, there in the ribbon of darkness that was the forest-edge
across the fields. Something moved and came lumbering out into the brooding
lunar luminance. A two-headed, grotesque monster, it came slowly, inexorably
out of the shadows. Gelid fingers clutched Leila's throat. What nightmare
thing was this, what awful spawn of the dark forest?

The porch floor heaved beneath her feet, threw her back against the
paint-peeled door. It wasn't there! She fell backward through it, fell
against a warm, feminine figure.

"What's the matter?" Eve Starr exclaimed. "Where have you been?"

"Close the door," Leila screamed. "Close it." Somehow she was on her feet
again, had her hand on the wood of the portal. She threw a single terrified
glance through the opening—

And checked the closing panel. Nearer and distinct now in the silvery
light, she saw what it was that had come out of the woods. Saw Stan's
lolling, pallid face. Saw that he was leaning heavily on the shoulder of
another man. Of—her blood was a black flood in her veins—of
Foster Corbett! Of his grizzled father who she thought lay dead at the foot
of West Cliff's high parapet!

She knew now who was Calban's master. She knew now whose high, shrill
whistle it was that had twice driven the monster from his prey—to save
Stan Corbett—

"LEILA," Eve cried. "Why is your door broken down and the
place upset? What's scared you so?"

Leila Monroy twisted to her, fell back in astonishment. The girl whom last
she had seen with a few shreds of torn clothing fluttering from her
lacerated, almost naked form was fully dressed, her hair carefully arranged,
no signs of the wild night about her.

"I saw your lights come on, after the storm and I came over to see if
anything was the matter. I found—"

Eve cut off as stumbling feet pounded on the boards outside the door, as
Foster Corbett staggered in with his grey-faced, limp burden.

"Stan! Mr. Corbett! In the name of all that's holy what's been going on
here?"

"Never—mind—now," the older man grunted. "Help me."

Leila jumped to his side. Together the three lifted Stan from his wavering
legs, carried him in to the living room where, hours ago, Leila had cringed
from the whispered lash of fancied voices and laid the youth on the couch
there. Stan groaned, his lids flickered open.

"Where—where—Dad!" His eyes lighted up. "Leila!
You—you're both here. Both all right?"

"Fairly all right, son," the old man answered.

There was a black bruise on his brow, another on his check. His clothing
was smeared with the brown loam into which he had fallen, his shoes were
packed with it. Otherwise he seemed unhurt. His bleared, brooding gaze
fastened on Leila, slid to Eve, went back to Stan.

"We'll do. But you need a doctor. I'll call—"

"No." Stan shoved himself up to a sitting position and Leila winced as his
face twitched with the pain of the effort. "No. I'm kind of frayed at the
edges, but I'll last. I'm like Eve. I want to know what this is all
about."

Leila started to speak, but the old man beat her to it.

"We'd all like to know that, Stan. Suppose you give us your story
first."

He was starting wrong end to, Leila thought. There was a reason for that.
He was concealing something. Of course he was concealing something. He was
Calban's master. He was the moving force behind all the terrible events of
the night and he wanted first to hear how much the others knew before he
concocted his own story to fit. She wouldn't interfere. She'd keep quiet and
give him rope enough to hang himself, and then...

But Stan was talking. "I tried to get to Leila, after the trial, but she
was gone by the time I managed to shove through the crowd. I saw Eve though,
told her to tell Leila I'd come to her as soon as my tour of duty was
over.

"The storm caught me as I came up the road. Leila's lights were all on. I
heard a scream from the house, and she didn't answer when I knocked on the
door. That scared me. I went frantic started to batter down the door. The
lights went out just as it gave way. I ploughed in, yelling for her. The
lightning showed me she wasn't on the lower floor. I started up the stairs. I
heard her scream again. A shot jabbed me. It seared across my ribs, jolted me
off balance.

"I guess I must have gone down on my head and knocked myself out, because
the next thing I knew, it seemed a long time after, I heard the door close
and saw her running into the woods."

Leila's eyes flicked to Eve. The girl was listening open-mouthed, did not
interrupt to correct Stan's misapprehension. That was queer. Queer as her
evident ignorance of all that had happened to her, or had
seemed
to
have happened to her. If she had lain, apparently dead, on the bed above, if
she had run, screaming in terror of Leila herself, through the woods, how
could she be so neatly dressed, so undisturbed? The awful doubt of her own
reason closed in once more on Leila with its nameless fear.

"Unaccountably the brute dropped me, and—and I fainted again from
loss of blood," Stan finished. "Then you were bending over me, Dad, were
helping me up."

"How about you, Leila?" Foster Corbett turned to her. "What's your end of
the story?"

His eyes bored into her, and in their rheumy depths she saw little lights
of triumph crawl. If she answered, she must convict herself—of sheer,
incredible madness. Of madness! How could she tell of finding Eve apparently
dead, of the strange scene of her terror in the woods, when the girl herself
was so calm, so unperturbed, so evidently ignorant of it all that? How could
she confess to the attack on Stan's father?

Her mouth opened, closed again. She swayed, put out a groping hand to the
arm of a chair to keep herself from falling. And Eve came to her rescue!

"Can't you see how weak she is, Mr. Corbett?" the dark-haired girl
indignantly exclaimed as she jumped to Leila's side and helped her into the
chair. "She can't talk!"

"But we've got to get at the bottom of this thing," Corbett insisted.
"There's something damned queer going on!"

"Seems to me you've got a story, too," Eve countered. "Why don't you tell
it?" Had the same thought occurred to her, too, Leila wondered, that the old
man had taken charge of the situation in order to cover up his own guilt?
"How come you were out there in the woods at this time of the morning?"

"Yes, Dad," Stan put in. "That's puzzling me, too."

Corbett made a peculiar little gesture with his gnarled hands, as of
defeat.

"I can't help much," he said. "But I'll tell what I know. When the storm
broke I thought of Leila and looked out of my window to try and see if she
were alone over here. The lightning struck into that line of poplars between
our farms. I saw some one among them just at the spot where we found Shean
Rourke—a dark, crouching figure watching the Monroy house. There was
something indescribably menacing in his pose, and it flashed on me that
perhaps we had been all wrong about Justin's being Rourke's murderer, that
perhaps this was the real killer, and that now he was after Leila.

"He started moving in the moment I glimpsed him, dodging low in the high
grass of the pasture. I lost sight of him. I ran to the phone to warn Leila.
I just had time to tell her to lock her doors and windows when the wire went
dead. I snatched up my gun, ran out to come to her aid.

"Her lights were going on, I saw her shadow going from window to window,
pulling the screens across them. And then I saw the fellow I'd spotted
before. He had climbed to the little roof over the kitchen porch, was sliding
into a window up there.

"I knew that because of my own warning Leila would not open the door to
me. By the time I got her to understand, the prowler would catch her, would
kill her. My only course was to go after him the way he had entered, try to
catch him before he did any damage.

"The storm redoubled in violence and I am an old man. It took me hours, it
seemed, before I managed to get to the house, before I managed to climb up to
that small, slanting roof. I heard a muffled scream from inside as I got into
the room up there, heard a damnable pandemonium going on. The room was pitch
black and a minute passed before I found the door and got out into the
hall.

"Just as I did so, the door crashed in below. I twisted to the stairway,
heard some one shout down there as he came in, could not make out the words.
Then I recognized Stan's voice, and in the same instant some one screamed
behind me.

"Some one screamed and a black form surged at me from somewhere behind,
struck me. The blow jolted my finger that was pressing the trigger of the gun
and fired the shot. I whipped around, in time to see that same dark,
grotesque form pounce on Leila and carry her off. I shouted, did not dare
shoot for fear of hitting her.