The Best of Robert E. Howard: Crimson Shadows (Volume 1) Read online

  Then the noise of a terrible and short struggle came clearly through the abysmal silence of the fen and the footfalls began again, but stumbling and uneven. The screaming continued, but with a gasping gurgle. The sweat stood cold on Kane’s forehead and body. This was heaping horror on horror in an intolerable manner.

  God, for a moment’s clear light! The frightful drama was being enacted within a very short distance of him, to judge by the ease with which the sounds reached him. But this hellish half-light veiled all in shifting shadows, so that the moors appeared a haze of blurred illusions, and stunted trees and bushes seemed like giants.

  Kane shouted, striving to increase the speed of his advance. The shrieks of the unknown broke into a hideous shrill squealing; again there was the sound of a struggle, and then from the shadows of the tall grass a thing came reeling — a thing that had once been a man — a gore-covered, frightful thing that fell at Kane’s feet and writhed and groveled and raised its terrible face to the rising moon, and gibbered and yammered, and fell down again and died in its own blood.

  The moon was up now and the light was better. Kane bent above the body, which lay stark in its unnamable mutilation, and he shuddered — a rare thing for him, who had seen the deeds of the Spanish Inquisition and the witch-finders.

  Some wayfarer, he supposed. Then like a hand of ice on his spine he was aware that he was not alone. He looked up, his cold eyes piercing the shadows whence the dead man had staggered. He saw nothing, but he knew — he felt — that other eyes gave back his stare, terrible eyes not of this earth. He straightened and drew a pistol, waiting. The moonlight spread like a lake of pale blood over the moor, and trees and grasses took on their proper sizes.

  The shadows melted, and Kane saw! At first he thought it only a shadow of mist, a wisp of moor fog that swayed in the tall grass before him. He gazed. More illusion, he thought. Then the thing began to take on shape, vague and indistinct. Two hideous eyes flamed at him — eyes which held all the stark horror which has been the heritage of man since the fearful dawn ages — eyes frightful and insane, with an insanity transcending earthly insanity. The form of the thing was misty and vague, a brain-shattering travesty on the human form, like, yet horridly unlike. The grass and bushes beyond showed clearly through it.

  Kane felt the blood pound in his temples, yet he was as cold as ice. How such an unstable being as that which wavered before him could harm a man in a physical way was more than he could understand, yet the red horror at his feet gave mute testimony that the fiend could act with terrible material effect.

  Of one thing Kane was sure: there would be no hunting of him across the dreary moors, no screaming and fleeing to be dragged down again and again. If he must die he would die in his tracks, his wounds in front.

  Now a vague and grisly mouth gaped wide and the demoniac laughter again shrieked out, soul-shaking in its nearness. And in the midst of that threat of doom, Kane deliberately leveled his long pistol and fired. A maniacal yell of rage and mockery answered the report, and the thing came at him like a flying sheet of smoke, long shadowy arms stretched to drag him down.

  Kane, moving with the dynamic speed of a famished wolf, fired the second pistol with as little effect, snatched his long rapier from its sheath and thrust into the center of the misty attacker. The blade sang as it passed clear through, encountering no solid resistance, and Kane felt icy fingers grip his limbs, bestial talons tear his garments and the skin beneath.

  He dropped the useless sword and sought to grapple with his foe. It was like fighting a floating mist, a flying shadow armed with daggerlike claws. His savage blows met empty air, his leanly mighty arms, in whose grasp strong men had died, swept nothingness and clutched emptiness. Naught was solid or real save the flaying, apelike fingers with their crooked talons, and the crazy eyes which burned into the shuddering depths of his soul.

  Kane realized that he was in a desperate plight indeed. Already his garments hung in tatters and he bled from a score of deep wounds. But he never flinched, and the thought of flight never entered his mind. He had never fled from a single foe, and had the thought occurred to him he would have flushed with shame.

  He saw no help for it now, but that his form should lie there beside the fragments of the other victim, but the thought held no terrors for him. His only wish was to give as good an account of himself as possible before the end came, and if he could, to inflict some damage on his unearthly foe.

  There above the dead man’s torn body, man fought with demon under the pale light of the rising moon, with all the advantages with the demon, save one. And that one was enough to overcome all the others. For if abstract hate may bring into material substance a ghostly thing, may not courage, equally abstract, form a concrete weapon to combat that ghost?

  Kane fought with his arms and his feet and his hands, and he was aware at last that the ghost began to give back before him, that the fearful laughter changed to screams of baffled fury. For man’s only weapon is courage that flinches not from the gates of Hell itself, and against such not even the legions of Hell can stand.

  Of this Kane knew nothing; he only knew that the talons which tore and rended him seemed to grow weaker and wavering, that a wild light grew and grew in the horrible eyes. And reeling and gasping, he rushed in, grappled the thing at last and threw it, and as they tumbled about on the moor and it writhed and lapped his limbs like a serpent of smoke, his flesh crawled and his hair stood on end, for he began to understand its gibbering.

  He did not hear and comprehend as a man hears and comprehends the speech of a man, but the frightful secrets it imparted in whisperings and yammerings and screaming silences sank fingers of ice and flame into his soul, and he knew.

  2

  The hut of old Ezra the miser stood by the road in the midst of the swamp, half-screened by the sullen trees which grew about it. The walls were rotting, the roof crumbling, and great, pallid and green fungus-monsters clung to it and writhed about the doors and windows, as if seeking to peer within. The trees leaned above it and their gray branches intertwined so that it crouched in the semi-darkness like a monstrous dwarf over whose shoulder ogres leer.

  The road which wound down into the swamp, among rotting stumps and rank hummocks and scummy, snake-haunted pools and bogs, crawled past the hut. Many people passed that way these days, but few saw old Ezra, save a glimpse of a yellow face, peering through the fungus-screened windows, itself like an ugly fungus.

  Old Ezra the miser partook much of the quality of the swamp, for he was gnarled and bent and sullen; his fingers were like clutching parasitic plants and his locks hung like drab moss above eyes trained to the murk of the swamplands. His eyes were like a dead man’s, yet hinted of depths abysmal and loathsome as the dead lakes of the swamplands.

  These eyes gleamed now at the man who stood in front of his hut. This man was tall and gaunt and dark, his face was haggard and claw-marked, and he was bandaged of arm and leg. Somewhat behind this man stood a number of villagers.

  “You are Ezra of the swamp road?”

  “Aye, and what want ye of me?”

  “Where is your cousin Gideon, the maniac youth who abode with you?”

  “Gideon?”

  “Aye.”

  “He wandered away into the swamp and never came back. No doubt he lost his way and was set upon by wolves or died in a quagmire or was struck by an adder.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Over a year.”

  “Aye. Hark ye, Ezra the miser. Soon after your cousin’s disappearance, a countryman, coming home across the moors, was set upon by some unknown fiend and torn to pieces, and thereafter it became death to cross those moors. First men of the countryside, then strangers who wandered over the fen, fell to the clutches of the thing. Many men have died, since the first one.

  “Last night I crossed the moors, and heard the flight and pursuing of another victim, a stranger who knew not the evil of the moors. Ezra the miser, it was a fearful thing, for the wretc
h twice broke from the fiend, terribly wounded, and each time the demon caught and dragged him down again. And at last he fell dead at my very feet, done to death in a manner that would freeze the statue of a saint.”

  The villagers moved restlessly and murmured fearfully to each other, and old Ezra’s eyes shifted furtively. Yet the somber expression of Solomon Kane never altered, and his condor-like stare seemed to transfix the miser.

  “Aye, aye!” muttered old Ezra hurriedly; “a bad thing, a bad thing! Yet why do you tell this thing to me?”

  “Aye, a sad thing. Harken further, Ezra. The fiend came out of the shadows and I fought with it, over the body of its victim. Aye, how I overcame it, I know not, for the battle was hard and long, but the powers of good and light were on my side, which are mightier than the powers of Hell.

  “At the last I was stronger, and it broke from me and fled, and I followed to no avail. Yet before it fled it whispered to me a monstrous truth.”

  Old Ezra started, stared wildly, seemed to shrink into himself.

  “Nay, why tell me this?” he muttered.

  “I returned to the village and told my tale,” said Kane, “for I knew that now I had the power to rid the moors of its curse forever. Ezra, come with us!”

  “Where?” gasped the miser.

  “To the rotting oak on the moors.”

  Ezra reeled as though struck; he screamed incoherently and turned to flee.

  On the instant, at Kane’s sharp order, two brawny villagers sprang forward and seized the miser. They twisted the dagger from his withered hand, and pinioned his arms, shuddering as their fingers encountered his clammy flesh.

  Kane motioned them to follow, and turning strode up the trail, followed by the villagers, who found their strength taxed to the utmost in their task of bearing their prisoner along. Through the swamp they went and out, taking a little-used trail which led up over the low hills and out on the moors.

  The sun was sliding down the horizon and old Ezra stared at it with bulging eyes — stared as if he could not gaze enough. Far out on the moors reared up the great oak tree, like a gibbet, now only a decaying shell. There Solomon Kane halted.

  Old Ezra writhed in his captor’s grasp and made inarticulate noises.

  “Over a year ago,” said Solomon Kane, “you, fearing that your insane cousin Gideon would tell men of your cruelties to him, brought him away from the swamp by the very trail by which we came, and murdered him here in the night.”

  Ezra cringed and snarled.

  “You can not prove this lie!”

  Kane spoke a few words to an agile villager. The youth clambered up the rotting bole of the tree and from a crevice, high up, dragged something that fell with a clatter at the feet of the miser. Ezra went limp with a terrible shriek.

  The object was a man’s skeleton, the skull cleft.

  “You — how knew you this? You are Satan!” gibbered old Ezra.

  Kane folded his arms.

  “The thing I fought last night told me this thing as we reeled in battle, and I followed it to this tree. For the fiend is Gideon’s ghost.”

  Ezra shrieked again and fought savagely.

  “You knew,” said Kane somberly, “you knew what thing did these deeds. You feared the ghost of the maniac, and that is why you chose to leave his body on the fen instead of concealing it in the swamp. For you knew the ghost would haunt the place of his death. He was insane in life, and in death he did not know where to find his slayer; else he had come to you in your hut. He hates no man but you, but his mazed spirit can not tell one man from another, and he slays all, lest he let his killer escape. Yet he will know you and rest in peace forever after. Hate hath made of his ghost a solid thing that can rend and slay, and though he feared you terribly in life, in death he fears you not.”

  Kane halted. He glanced at the sun.

  “All this I had from Gideon’s ghost, in his yammerings and his whisperings and his shrieking silences. Naught but your death will lay that ghost.”

  Ezra listened in breathless silence and Kane pronounced the words of his doom.

  “A hard thing it is,” said Kane somberly, “to sentence a man to death in cold blood and in such a manner as I have in mind, but you must die that others may live — and God knoweth you deserve death.

  “You shall not die by noose, bullet or sword, but at the talons of him you slew — for naught else will satiate him.”

  At these words Ezra’s brain shattered, his knees gave way and he fell groveling and screaming for death, begging them to burn him at the stake, to flay him alive. Kane’s face was set like death, and the villagers, the fear rousing their cruelty, bound the screeching wretch to the oak tree, and one of them bade him make his peace with God. But Ezra made no answer, shrieking in a high shrill voice with unbearable monotony. Then the villager would have struck the miser across the face, but Kane stayed him.

  “Let him make his peace with Satan, whom he is more like to meet,” said the Puritan grimly. “The sun is about to set. Loose his cords so that he may work loose by dark, since it is better to meet death free and unshackled than bound like a sacrifice.”

  As they turned to leave him, old Ezra yammered and gibbered unhuman sounds and then fell silent, staring at the sun with terrible intensity.

  They walked away across the fen, and Kane flung a last look at the grotesque form bound to the tree, seeming in the uncertain light like a great fungus growing to the bole. And suddenly the miser screamed hideously:

  “Death! Death! There are skulls in the stars!”

  “Life was good to him, though he was gnarled and churlish and evil,” Kane sighed. “Mayhap God has a place for such souls where fire and sacrifice may cleanse them of their dross as fire cleans the forest of fungous things. Yet my heart is heavy within me.”

  “Nay, sir,” one of the villagers spoke, “you have done but the will of God, and good alone shall come of this night’s deed.”

  “Nay,” answered Kane heavily, “I know not — I know not.”

  The sun had gone down and night spread with amazing swiftness, as if great shadows came rushing down from unknown voids to cloak the world with hurrying darkness. Through the thick night came a weird echo, and the men halted and looked back the way they had come.

  Nothing could be seen. The moor was an ocean of shadows and the tall grass about them bent in long waves before the faint wind, breaking the deathly stillness with breathless murmurings.

  Then far away the red disk of the moon rose over the fen, and for an instant a grim silhouette was etched blackly against it. A shape came flying across the face of the moon — a bent, grotesque thing whose feet seemed scarcely to touch the earth; and close behind came a thing like a flying shadow — a nameless, shapeless horror.

  A moment the racing twain stood out boldly against the moon; then they merged into one unnamable, formless mass, and vanished in the shadows.

  Far across the fen sounded a single shriek of terrible laughter.

  CRETE

  Weird Tales, February 1929

  The green waves wash above us

  Who slumber in the bay

  As washed the tide of ages

  That swept our race away.

  Our cities — dusty ruins;

  Our galleys — deep-sea slime;

  Our very ghosts, forgotten,

  Bow to the sweep of Time.

  Our land lies stark before it

  As we to alien spears,

  But, ah, the love we bore it

  Outlasts the crawling years.

  Ah, jeweled spires at even —

  The lute’s soft golden sigh —

  The Lion-Gates of Knossos

  When dawn was in the sky.

  MOON MOCKERY

  Weird Tales, April 1929

  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.”

  RATTLE OF BONES

  Weird Tales, June 1929

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

  “This place hath a forbidding aspect, meseemeth.”

  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.