Delphi Works of Robert E. Howard (Illustrated) (Series Four) Page 3

Her voice was soft and musical, with just a touch of foreign accent which I found delightful. As for the girl herself, every intonation, every movement proclaimed the Orient. She was a fragrant breath from the East. From her night- black hair, piled high above her alabaster forehead, to her little feet, encased in high-heeled pointed slippers, she portrayed the highest ideal of Asiatic loveliness — an effect which was heightened rather than lessened by the English blouse and skirt which she wore.

  “You are beautiful!” I said dazedly. “Who are you?”

  “I am Zuleika,” she answered with a shy smile. “I — I am glad you like me. I am glad you no longer dream hashish dreams.”

  Strange that so small a thing should set my heart to leaping wildly!

  “I owe it all to you, Zuleika,” I said huskily. “Had not I dreamed of you every hour since you first lifted me from the gutter, I had lacked the power of even hoping to be freed from my curse.”

  She blushed prettily and intertwined her white fingers as if in nervousness.

  “You leave England tomorrow?” she said suddenly.

  “Yes. Hassim has not returned with my ticket—” I hesitated suddenly, remembering the command of silence.

  “Yes, I know, I know!” she whispered swiftly, her eyes widening. “And John Gordon has been here! He saw you!”

  “Yes!”

  She came close to me with a quick lithe movement.

  “You are to impersonate some man! Listen, while you are doing this, you must not ever let Gordon see you! He would know you, no matter what your disguise! He is a terrible man!”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, completely bewildered. “How did the Master break me of my hashish craving? Who is this Gordon and why did he come here? Why does the Master go disguised as a leper — and who is he? Above all, why am I to impersonate a man I never saw or heard of?”

  “I cannot — I dare not tell you!” she whispered, her face paling. “I—”

  Somewhere in the house sounded the faint tones of a Chinese gong. The girl started like a frightened gazelle.

  “I must go! He summons me!”

  She opened the door, darted through, halted a moment to electrify me with her passionate exclamation: “Oh, be careful, be very careful, sahib!”

  Then she was gone.

  * * *

  7. THE MAN OF THE SKULL

  “What the hammer? What the chain?

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  What the anvil? What dread grasp

  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?”

  — Blake

  A WHILE after my beautiful and mysterious visitor had left, I sat in meditation. I believed that I had at last stumbled onto an explanation of a part of the enigma, at any rate. This was the conclusion I had reached: Yun Shatu, the opium lord, was simply the agent or servant of some organization or individual whose work was on a far larger scale than merely supplying dope addicts in the Temple of Dreams. This man or these men needed co-workers among all classes of people; in other words, I was being let in with a group of opium smugglers on a gigantic scale. Gordon no doubt had been investigating the case, and his presence alone showed that it was no ordinary one, for I knew that he held a high position with the English government, though just what, I did not know.

  Opium or not, I determined to carry out my obligation to the Master. My moral sense had been blunted by the dark ways I had traveled, and the thought of despicable crime did not enter my head. I was indeed hardened. More, the mere debt of gratitude was increased a thousand-fold by the thought of the girl. To the Master I owed it that I was able to stand up on my feet and look into her clear eyes as a man should. So if he wished my services as a smuggler of dope, he should have them. No doubt I was to impersonate some man so high in governmental esteem that the usual actions of the customs officers would be deemed unnecessary; was I to bring some rare dream-producer into England?

  These thoughts were in my mind as I went downstairs, but ever back of them hovered other and more alluring suppositions — what was the reason for the girl, here in this vile dive — a rose in a garbage-heap — and who was she?

  As I entered the outer bar, Hassim came in, his brows set in a dark scowl of anger, and, I believed, fear. He carried a newspaper in his hand, folded.

  “I told you to wait in opium room,” he snarled.

  “You were gone so long that I went up to my room. Have you the ticket?”

  He merely grunted and pushed on past me into the opium room, and standing at the door I saw him cross the floor and disappear into the rear room. I stood there, my bewilderment increasing. For as Hassim had brushed past me, I had noted an item on the face of the paper, against which his black thumb was tightly pressed as if to mark that special column of news.

  And with the unnatural celerity of action and judgment which seemed to be mine those days, I had in that fleeting instant read:

  AFRICAN SPECIAL COMMISSIONER FOUND MURDERED!

  The body of Major Fairlan Morley was yesterday discovered in a rotting ship’s hold at Bordeaux...

  No more I saw of the details, but that alone was enough to make me think! The affair seemed to be taking on an ugly aspect. Yet —

  Another day passed. To my inquiries, Hassim snarled that the plans had been changed and I was not to go to France. Then, late in the evening, he came to bid me once more to the room of mystery.

  I stood before the lacquer screen, the yellow smoke acrid in my nostrils, the woven dragons writhing along the tapestries, the palm trees rearing thick and oppressive.

  “A change has come in our plans,” said the hidden voice. “You will not sail as was decided before. But I have other work that you may do. Mayhap this will be more to your type of usefulness, for I admit you have somewhat disappointed me in regard to subtlety. You interfered the other day in such manner as will no doubt cause me great inconvenience in the future.”

  I said nothing, but a feeling of resentment began to stir in me.

  “Even after the assurance of one of my most trusted servants,” the toneless voice continued, with no mark of any emotion save a slightly rising note, “you insisted on releasing my most deadly enemy. Be more circumspect in the future.”

  “I saved your life!” I said angrily.

  “And for that reason alone I overlook your mistake — this time!”

  A slow fury suddenly surged up in me.

  “This time! Make the best of it this time, for I assure you there will be no next time. I owe you a greater debt than I can ever hope to pay, but that does not make me your slave. I have saved your life — the debt is as near paid as a man can pay it. Go your way and I go mine!”

  A low, hideous laugh answered me, like a reptilian hiss.

  “You fool! You will pay with your whole life’s toil! You say you are not my slave? I say you are — just as black Hassim there beside you is my slave — just as the girl Zuleika is my slave, who has bewitched you with her beauty.”

  These words sent a wave of hot blood to my brain and I was conscious of a flood of fury which completely engulfed my reason for a second. Just as all my moods and senses seemed sharpened and exaggerated those days, so now this burst of rage transcended every moment of anger I had ever had before.

  “Hell’s fiends!” I shrieked. “You devil — who are you and what is your hold on me? I’ll see you or die!”

  Hassim sprang at me, but I hurled him backward and with one stride reached the screen and flung it aside with an incredible effort of strength. Then I shrank back, hands outflung, shrieking. A tall, gaunt figure stood before me, a figure arrayed grotesquely in a silk brocaded gown which fell to the floor.

  From the sleeves of this gown protruded hands which filled me with crawling horror — long, predatory hands, with thin bony fingers and curved talons — withered skin of a parchment brownish-yellow, like the hands of a man long dead.

  The hands — but, oh God, the face! A skull to which no vestige of flesh seemed to remain but on which taut brownish-yellow skin
grew fast, etching out every detail of that terrible death’s-head. The forehead was high and in a way magnificent, but the head was curiously narrow through the temples, and from under penthouse brows great eyes glimmered like pools of yellow fire. The nose was high-bridged and very thin; the mouth was a mere colorless gash between thin, cruel lips. A long, bony neck supported this frightful vision and completed the effect of a reptilian demon from some medieval hell.

  I was face to face with the skull-faced man of my dreams!

  * * *

  8. BLACK WISDOM

  “By thought a crawling ruin,

  By life a leaping mire.

  By a broken heart in the breast of the world

  And the end of the world’s desire.”

  — Chesterton

  THE terrible spectacle drove for the instant all thought of rebellion from my mind. My very blood froze in my veins and I stood motionless. I heard Hassim laugh grimly behind me. The eyes in the cadaverous face blazed fiendishly at me and I blanched from the concentrated satanic fury in them.

  Then the horror laughed sibilantly.

  “I do you a great honor, Mr. Costigan; among a very few, even of my own servants, you may say that you saw my face and lived. I think you will be more useful to me living than dead.”

  I was silent, completely unnerved. It was difficult to believe that this man lived, for his appearance certainly belied the thought. He seemed horribly like a mummy. Yet his lips moved when he spoke and his eyes flamed with hideous life.

  “You will do as I say,” he said abruptly, and his voice had taken on a note of command. “You doubtless know, or know of, Sir Haldred Frenton?”

  “Yes.”

  Every man of culture in Europe and America was familiar with the travel books of Sir Haldred Frenton, author and soldier of fortune.

  “You will go to Sir Haldred’s estate tonight—”

  “Yes?”

  “And kill him!”

  I staggered, literally. This order was incredible — unspeakable! I had sunk low, low enough to smuggle opium, but to deliberately murder a man I had never seen, a man noted for his kindly deeds! That was too monstrous even to contemplate.

  “You do not refuse?”

  The tone was as loathly and as mocking as the hiss of a serpent.

  “Refuse?” I screamed, finding my voice at last. “Refuse? You incarnate devil! Of course I refuse! You—”

  Something in the cold assurance of his manner halted me — froze me into apprehensive silence.

  “You fool!” he said calmly. “I broke the hashish chains — do you know how? Four minutes from now you will know and curse the day you were born! Have you not thought it strange, the swiftness of brain, the resilience of body — the brain that should be rusty and slow, the body that should be weak and sluggish from years of abuse? That blow that felled John Gordon — have you not wondered at its might? The ease with which you mastered Major Morley’s records — have you not wondered at that? You fool, you are bound to me by chains of steel and blood and fire! I have kept you alive and sane — I alone. Each day the life-saving elixir has been given you in your wine. You could not live and keep your reason without it. And I and only I know its secret!”

  He glanced at a queer timepiece which stood on a table at his elbow.

  “This time I had Yun Shatu leave the elixir out — I anticipated rebellion. The time is near — ha, it strikes!”

  Something else he said, but I did not hear. I did not see, nor did I feel in the human sense of the word. I was writhing at his feet, screaming and gibbering in the flames of such hells as men have never dreamed of.

  Aye, I knew now! He had simply given me a dope so much stronger that it drowned the hashish. My unnatural ability was explainable now — I had simply been acting under the stimulus of something which combined all the hells in its makeup, which stimulated, something like heroin, but whose effect was unnoticed by the victim. What it was, I had no idea, nor did I believe anyone knew save that hellish being who stood watching me with grim amusement. But it had held my brain together, instilling into my system a need for it, and now my frightful craving tore my soul asunder.

  Never, in my moments of worst shell-shock or my moments of hashish- craving, have I ever experienced anything like that. I burned with the heat of a thousand hells and froze with an iciness that was colder than any ice, a hundred times. I swept down to the deepest pits of torture and up to the highest crags of torment — a million yelling devils hemmed me in, shrieking and stabbing. Bone by bone, vein by vein, cell by cell I felt my body disintegrate and fly in bloody atoms all over the universe — and each separate cell was an entire system of quivering, screaming nerves. And they gathered from far voids and reunited with a greater torment.

  Through the fiery bloody mists I heard my own voice screaming, a monotonous yammering. Then with distended eyes I saw a golden goblet, held by a claw-like hand, swim into view — a goblet filled with an amber liquid.

  With a bestial screech, I seized it with both hands, being dimly aware that the metal stem gave beneath my fingers, and brought the brim to my lips. I drank in frenzied haste, the liquid slopping down onto my breast.

  * * *

  9. KATHULOS OF EGYPT

  “Night shall be thrice night over you,

  And Heaven an iron cope.”

  — Chesterton

  THE Skull-faced One stood watching me critically as I sat panting on a couch, completely exhausted. He held in his hand the goblet and surveyed the golden stem, which was crushed out of all shape. This my maniac fingers had done in the instant of drinking.

  “Superhuman strength, even for a man in your condition,” he said with a sort of creaky pedantry. “I doubt if even Hassim here could equal it. Are you ready for your instructions now?”

  I nodded, wordless. Already the hellish strength of the elixir was flowing through my veins, renewing my burnt-out force. I wondered how long a man could live as I lived being constantly burned out and artificially rebuilt.

  “You will be given a disguise and will go alone to the Frenton estate. No one suspects any design against Sir Haldred and your entrance into the estate and the house itself should be a matter of comparative ease. You will not don the disguise — which will be of unique nature — until you are ready to enter the estate. You will then proceed to Sir Haldred’s room and kill him, breaking his neck with your bare hands — this is essential—”

  The voice droned on, giving the ghastly orders in a frightfully casual and matter-of-fact way. The cold sweat beaded my brow.

  “You will then leave the estate, taking care to leave the imprint of your hand somewhere plainly visible, and the automobile, which will be waiting for you at some safe place nearby, will bring you back here, you having first removed the disguise. I have, in case of complications, any amount of men who will swear that you spent the entire night in the Temple of Dreams and never left it. But here must be no detection! Go warily and perform your task surely, for you know the alternative.”

  I did not return to the opium house but was taken through winding corridors, hung with heavy tapestries, to a small room containing only an oriental couch. Hassim gave me to understand that I was to remain here until after nightfall and then left me. The door was closed but I made no effort to discover if it was locked. The Skull-faced Master held me with stronger shackles than locks and bolts.

  Seated upon the couch in the bizarre setting of a chamber which might have been a room in an Indian zenana, I faced fact squarely and fought out my battle. There was still in me some trace of manhood left — more than the fiend had reckoned, and added to this were black despair and desperation. I chose and determined on my only course.

  Suddenly the door opened softly. Some intuition told me whom to expect, nor was I disappointed. Zuleika stood, a glorious vision before me — a vision which mocked me, made blacker my despair and yet thrilled me with wild yearning and reasonless joy.

  She bore a tray of food which she set beside me,
and then she seated herself on the couch, her large eyes fixed upon my face. A flower in a serpent den she was, and the beauty of her took hold of my heart.

  “Steephen!” she whispered, and I thrilled as she spoke my name for the first time.

  Her luminous eyes suddenly shone with tears and she laid her little hand on my arm. I seized it in both my rough hands.

  “They have set you a task which you fear and hate!” she faltered.

  “Aye,” I almost laughed, “but I’ll fool them yet! Zuleika, tell me — what is the meaning of all this?”

  She glanced fearfully around her.

  “I do not know all” — she hesitated— “your plight is all my fault but I — I hoped — Steephen, I have watched you every time you came to Yun Shatu’s for months. You did not see me but I saw you, and I saw in you, not the broken sot your rags proclaimed, but a wounded soul, a soul bruised terribly on the ramparts of life. And from my heart I pitied you. Then when Hassim abused you that day” — again tears started to her eyes— “I could not bear it and I knew how you suffered for want of hashish. So I paid Yun Shatu, and going to the Master I — I — oh, you will hate me for this!” she sobbed.

  “No — no — never—”

  “I told him that you were a man who might be of use to him and begged him to have Yun Shatu supply you with what you needed. He had already noticed you, for his is the eye of the slaver and all the world is his slave market! So he bade Yun Shatu do as I asked; and now — better if you had remained as you were, my friend.”

  “No! No!” I exclaimed. “I have known a few days of regeneration, even if it was false! I have stood before you as a man, and that is worth all else!”

  And all that I felt for her must have looked forth from my eyes, for she dropped hers and flushed. Ask me not how love comes to a man; but I knew that I loved Zuleika — had loved this mysterious oriental girl since first I saw her — and somehow I felt that she, in a measure, returned my affection. This realization made blacker and more barren the road I had chosen; yet — for pure love must ever strengthen a man — it nerved me to what I must do.