Moon of Skulls Read online

  “Them vampires, he sleep in caves most all day till sunset. Them caves, he be full of one fellow dead man.”

  The sun rose higher, baking down on the bare slopes with an intolerable heat. Silence brooded like an evil monster over the land. They had seen nothing, but Kane could have sworn at times that a black shadow drifted behind a boulder at their approach.

  “Them vampires, they stay hid in daytime,” said N’Longa with a low laugh. “They be afraid of one fellow vulture! No fool vulture! He know death when he see it! He pounce on one fellow dead man and tear and eat if he be lying or walking!”

  A strong shudder shook his companion.

  “Great God!” Kane cried, striking his thigh with his hat; “is there no end to the horror of this hideous land? Truly this land is dedicated to the powers of darkness!”

  Kane’s eyes burned with a dangerous light. The terrible heat, the solitude and the knowledge of the horrors lurking on either hand were shaking even his steely nerves.

  “Keep on one fellow hat, blood-brother,” admonished N’Longa with a low gurgle of amusement. “That fellow sun, he knock you dead, suppose you no look out.”

  Kane shifted the musket he had insisted on bringing and made no reply. They mounted an eminence at last and looked down on a sort of plateau. And in the center of this plateau was a silent city of gray and crumbling stone. Kane was smitten by a sense of incredible age as he looked. The walls and houses were of great stone blocks, yet they were falling into ruin. Grass grew on the plateau, and high in the streets of that dead city. Kane saw no movement among the ruins.

  “That is their city — why do they choose to sleep in caves?”

  “Maybe-so one fellow stone fall on them from roof and crush. Them stone huts, he fall down bimeby. Maybe-so they no like to stay together — maybe-so they eat each other, too.”

  “Silence!” whispered Kane; “how it hangs over all!”

  “Them vampires no talk nor yell; they dead. They sleep in caves, wander at sunset and at night. Maybe-so them black fellow bush tribes come with spears, them vampires go to stone kraal and fight behind walls.”

  Kane nodded. The crumbling walls which surrounded that dead city were still high and solid enough to resist the attack of spearmen — especially when defended by these snout-nosed fiends.

  “Blood-brother,” said N’Longa solemnly, “I have mighty magic thought! Be silent a little while.”

  Kane seated himself on a boulder and gazed broodingly at the bare crags and slopes which surrounded them. Far away to the south he saw the leafy green ocean that was the jungle. Distance lent a certain enchantment to the scene. Closer at hand loomed the dark blotches that were the mouths of the caves of horror.

  N’Longa was squatting, tracing some strange pattern in the clay with a dagger point. Kane watched him, thinking how easy they might fall victim to the vampires if even three or four of the fiends should come out of their caverns. And even as he thought it, a black and horrific shadow fell across the crouching fetish-man.

  Kane acted without conscious thought. He shot from the boulder where he sat like a stone hurled from a catapult, and his musket stock shattered the face of the hideous black thing who had stolen upon them. Back and back Kane drove his inhuman foe staggering, never giving him time to halt or launch an offensive, battering him with the onslaught of a frenzied tiger.

  At the very edge of the cliff the vampire wavered, then pitched back over, to fall for a hundred feet and lie writhing on the rocks of the plateau below. N’Longa was on his feet pointing; the hills were giving up their dead.

  Out of the caves they were swarming, the terrible black silent shapes; up the slopes they came charging and over the boulders they came clambering, and their red eyes were all turned toward the two humans who stood above the silent city. The caves belched them forth in an unholy judgment day.

  N’Longa pointed to a crag some distance away and with a shout started running fleetly toward it. Kane followed. From behind boulders black-taloned hands clawed at them, tearing their garments. They raced past caves, and mummied monsters came lurching out of the dark, gibbering silently, to join in the pursuit.

  The dead hands were close at their back when they scrambled up the last slope and stood on a ledge which was the top of the crag. The fiends halted silently a moment, then came clambering after them. Kane clubbed his musket and smashed down into the red-eyed faces, knocking aside the upleaping hands. They surged up like a black wave; he swung his musket in a silent fury that matched theirs. The black wave broke and wavered back; came on again.

  He — could — not — kill — them! These words beat on his brain like a sledge on an anvil as he shattered wood-like flesh and dead bone with his smashing swings. He knocked them down, hurled them back, but they rose and came on again. This could not last — what in God’s name was N’Longa doing? Kane spared one swift, tortured glance over his shoulder. The fetish-man stood on the highest part of the ledge, head thrown back, arms lifted as if in invocation.

  Kane’s vision blurred to the sweep of hideous black faces with red, staring eyes. Those in front were horrible to see now, for their skulls were shattered, their faces caved in and their limbs broken. But still they came on and those behind reached across their shoulders to clutch at the man who defied them.

  Kane was red but the blood was all his. From the long-withered veins of those monsters no single drop of warm red blood trickled. Suddenly from behind him came a long piercing wail — N’Longa! Over the crash of the flying musket-stock and the shattering of bones it sounded high and clear — the only voice lifted in that hideous fight.

  The black wave washed about Kane’s feet, dragging him down. Keen talons tore at him, flaccid lips sucked at his wounds. He reeled up again, disheveled and bloody, clearing a space with a shattering sweep of his splintered musket. Then they closed in again and he went down.

  “This is the end!” he thought, but even at that instant the press slackened and the sky was suddenly filled with the beat of great wings.

  Then he was free and staggered up, blindly and dizzily, ready to renew the strife. He halted, frozen. Down the slope the black horde was fleeing and over their heads and close at their shoulders flew huge vultures, tearing and rending avidly, sinking their beaks in the dead black flesh, devouring the vampires as they fled.

  Kane laughed, almost insanely.

  “Defy man and God, but you may not deceive the vultures, sons of Satan! They know whether a man be alive or dead!”

  N’Longa stood like a prophet on the pinnacle and the great black birds soared and wheeled about him. His arms still waved and his voice still wailed out across the hills. And over the skylines they came, hordes on endless hordes — vultures, vultures, vultures! — come to the feast so long denied them. They blackened the sky with their numbers, blotted out the sun; a strange darkness fell on the land. They settled in long dusky lines, diving into the caverns with a whir of wings and a clash of beaks. Their talons tore at the black horrors which these caves disgorged.

  Now all the vampires were fleeing to their city. The vengeance held back for ages had come down on them and their last hope was the heavy walls which had kept back the desperate human foes. Under those crumbling roofs they might find shelter. And N’Longa watched them stream into the city, and he laughed until the crags re-echoed.

  Now all were in and the birds settled like a cloud over the doomed city, perching in solid rows along the walls, sharpening their beaks and claws on the towers.

  And N’Longa struck flint and steel to a bundle of dry leaves he had brought with him. The bundle leaped into instant flame and he straightened and flung the blazing thing far out over the cliffs. It fell like a meteor to the plateau beneath, showering sparks. The tall grass of the plateau leaped aflame.

  From the silent city beneath them Fear flowed in unseen waves, like a white fog. Kane smiled grimly.

  “The grass is sere and brittle from the drought,” he said; “there has been even less rain
than usual this season; it will burn swiftly.”

  Like a crimson serpent the fire ran through the high dead grass. It spread and it spread and Kane, standing high above, yet felt the fearful intensity of the hundreds of red eyes which watched from the stone city.

  Now the scarlet snake had reached the walls and was rearing as if to coil and writhe over them. The vultures rose on heavily flapping wings and soared reluctantly. A vagrant gust of wind whipped the blaze about and drove it in a long red sheet around the wall. Now the city was hemmed in on all sides by a solid barricade of flame. The roar came up to the two men on the high crag.

  Sparks flew across the wall, lighting in the high grass in the streets. A score of flames leaped up and grew with terrifying speed. A veil of red cloaked streets and buildings, and through this crimson, whirling mist Kane and N’Longa saw hundreds of black shapes scamper and writhe, to vanish suddenly in red bursts of flame. There rose an intolerable scent of decayed flesh burning.

  Kane gazed, awed. This was truly a Hell on earth. As in a nightmare he looked into the roaring red cauldron where black insects fought against their doom and perished. The flames leaped a hundred feet into the air, and suddenly above their roar sounded one bestial, inhuman scream like a shriek from across nameless gulfs of cosmic space, as one vampire, dying, broke the chains of silence which had held him for untold centuries. High and haunting it rose, the death cry of a vanishing race.

  Then the flames dropped suddenly. The conflagration had been a typical grass fire, short and fierce. Now the plateau showed a blackened expanse and the city a charred and smoking mass of crumbling stone. Not one corpse lay in view, not even a charred bone. Above all whirled the dark swarms of the vultures, but they, too, were beginning to scatter.

  Kane gazed hungrily at the clean blue sky. Like a strong sea wind clearing a fog of horror was the sight to him. From somewhere sounded the faint and far-off roaring of a distant lion. The vultures were flapping away in black, straggling lines.

  5. Palaver Set!

  Kane sat in the mouth of the cave where Zunna lay, submitting to the fetish-man’s bandaging.

  The Puritan’s garments hung in tatters about his frame; his limbs and breast were deeply gashed and darkly bruised, but he had had no mortal wound in that deathly fight on the cliff.

  “Mighty men, we be!” declared N’Longa with deep approval. “Vampire city be silent now, sure ’nough! No walking dead man live along these hills.”

  “I do not understand,” said Kane, resting chin on hand. “Tell me, N’Longa, how have you done things? How talked you with me in my dreams; how came you into the body of Kran; and how summoned you the vultures?”

  “My blood-brother,” said N’Longa, discarding his pride in his pidgin English, to drop into the river language understood by Kane, “I am so old that you would call me a liar if I told you my age. All my life I have worked magic, sitting first at the feet of mighty ju-ju men of the south and the east; then I was a slave to the Buckra — the white man — and learned more. My brother, shall I span all these years in a moment and make you understand with a word, what has taken me so long to learn? I could not even make you understand how these vampires have kept their bodies from decay by drinking the lives of men.

  “I sleep and my spirit goes out over the jungle and the rivers to talk with the sleeping spirits of my friends. There is a mighty magic on the voodoo staff I gave you — a magic out of the Old Land which draws my ghost to it as a white man’s magnet draws metal.”

  Kane listened unspeaking, seeing for the first time in N’Longa’s glittering eyes something stronger and deeper than the avid gleam of the worker in black magic. To Kane it seemed almost as if he looked into the far-seeing and mystic eyes of a prophet of old.

  “I spoke to you in dreams,” N’Longa went on, “and I made a deep sleep come over the souls of Kran and of Zunna, and remove them to a far dim land, whence they shall soon return, unremembering. All things bow to magic, blood-brother, and beasts and birds obey the master words. I worked strong voodoo, vulture-magic, and the flying people of the air gathered at my call.

  “These things I know and am a part of, but how shall I tell you of them? Blood-brother, you are a mighty warrior, but in the ways of magic you are as a little child lost. And what has taken me long dark years to know, I may not divulge to you so you would understand. My friend, you think only of bad spirits, but were my magic always bad, should I not take this fine young body in place of my old wrinkled one and keep it? But Kran shall have his body back safely.

  “Keep the voodoo staff, blood-brother. It has mighty power against all sorcerers and serpents and evil things. Now I return to the village on the Coast where my true body sleeps. And what of you, my blood-brother?”

  Kane pointed silently eastward.

  “The call grows no weaker. I go.”

  N’Longa nodded, held out his hand. Kane grasped it. The mystical expression had gone from the dusky face and the eyes twinkled snakily with a sort of reptilian mirth.

  “Me go now, blood-brother,” said the fetish-man, returning to his beloved jargon, of which knowledge he was prouder than all his conjuring tricks. “You take care — that one fellow jungle, she pluck your bones yet! Remember that voodoo stave, brother. Ai ya, palaver set!”

  He fell back on the sand, and Kane saw the keen sly expression of N’Longa fading from the face of Kran. His flesh crawled again. Somewhere back on the Slave Coast, the body of N’Longa, withered and wrinkled, was stirring in the ju-ju hut, was rising as if from a deep sleep. Kane shuddered.

  Kran sat up, yawned, stretched and smiled. Beside him the girl Zunna rose, rubbing her eyes.

  “Master,” said Kran apologetically, “we must have slumbered.”

  BLACK CHANT IMPERIAL

  Weird Tales, September 1930

  Trumpets triumph in red disaster,

  White skulls litter the broken sod,

  And we who ride for the one Black Master

  Howl at the iron gates of God.

  Temples rock and the singers falter,

  Lights go out in the rushing gloom —

  Slay the priests on this blackened altar,

  Rip the babe from the woman’s womb!

  Black be the night that locks around them,

  They who chant of the Good and Light,

  Black be the pinions that shall confound them,

  Breaking their brains with a deadly fright.

  Praised be the Prince that reigns forever

  Throned in the shadows stark and grim,

  Where cypress moans by the midnight river —

  Lift your goblets and drink to him!

  Virgins wail and a babe is whining

  Nailed like a fly on a gory lance;

  White on the skulls the stars are shining,

  Over them sweeps our demon’s dance.

  Trumpets bray and the star are riven!

  Shatter the altar, blot the light!

  From the bursting hells to the fallen heaven

  We are kings of the world tonight!

  THE VOICE OF EL-LIL

  Oriental Stories, October-November 1930

  Maskat, like many another port, is a haven for the drifters of many nations who bring their tribal customs and peculiarities with them. Turk rubs shoulders with Greek and Arab squabbles with Hindoo. The tongues of half the Orient resound in the loud smelly bazaar. Therefore it did not seem particularly incongruous to hear, as I leaned on a bar tended by a smirking Eurasian, the musical notes of a Chinese gong sound clearly through the lazy hum of native traffic. There was certainly nothing so startling in those mellow tones that the big Englishman next me should start and swear and spill his whisky-and-soda on my sleeve.

  He apologized and berated his clumsiness with honest profanity, but I saw he was shaken. He interested me as his type always does — a fine upstanding fellow he was; over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, heavy-limbed, the perfect fighting man, brown-faced, blue-eyed and tawny-haired.
His breed is old as Europe, and the man himself brought to mind vague legendary characters — Hengist, Hereward, Cerdic — born rovers and fighters of the original Anglo-Saxon stock.

  I saw, furthermore, that he was in a mood to talk. I introduced myself, ordered drinks and waited. My specimen thanked me, muttered to himself, quaffed his liquor hastily and spoke abruptly:

  “You’re wondering why a grown man should be so suddenly upset by such a small thing — well, I admit that damned gong gave me a start. It’s that fool Yotai Lao, bringing his nasty joss sticks and Buddhas into a decent town — for a half-penny I’d bribe some Moslem fanatic to cut his yellow throat and sink his confounded gong into the gulf. And I’ll tell you why I hate the thing.

  “My name,” said my Saxon, “is Bill Kirby. It was in Jibuti on the Gulf of Aden that I met John Conrad. A slim, keen-eyed young New Englander he was — professor too, for all his youth. Victim of obsession also, like most of his kind. He was a student of bugs, and it was a particular bug that had brought him to the East Coast; or rather, the hope of the blooming beast, for he never found it. It was almost uncanny to see the chap work himself into a blaze of enthusiasm when speaking on his favorite subject. No doubt he could have taught me much I should know, but insects are not among my enthusiasms, and he talked, dreamed and thought of little else at first. . . .

  “Well, we paired off well from the start. He had money and ambitions and I had a bit of experience and a roving foot. We got together a small, modest but efficient safari and wandered down into the back country of Somaliland. Now you’ll hear it spoken today that this country has been exhaustively explored and I can prove that statement to be a lie. We found things that no white man has ever dreamed of.