Darkness and Dawn (63 page)

He swung the searchlight on the canyon, as they swept above it. He
flung the pencil of radiance in a wide sweep up the cliff and down
along the terrace.

It gave no sight, no sign of Beatrice.

"Sleeping, of course," he reflected.

And now, Hope River past, and the canyon swallowed by the dense
forest, he flung his light once more ahead. With it he felt out the
rocky barrens for a landing-place.

Not more than twenty minutes later, followed by Bremilu and Zangamon,
Stern was making way through the thick-laced wood and jungle.

Awed, terrified by their first sight of trees and by the upper world
which to them was naught but marvel and danger, the two Merucaans
followed close behind their guide. Even so would you or I cling to the
Martian who should land us on that ruddy planet and pilot us through
some huge, inchoate and grotesque growth of things to us perfectly
unimaginable.

"Oh, master, we shall see the patriarch soon?" asked Bremilu, in a
strange voice—a voice to him astonishingly loud, in the clear air of
night upon the surface of the world. "Soon shall we speak with him
and—"

"Hark! What's that?" interrupted Stern, pausing, the while he gripped
his pistol tighter.

From afar, though in which direction he could not say, a vague, dull
roar made itself heard through the forest.

Sonorous, vibrant, menacing, it echoed and died; and then again, as
once before, Stern heard that strange, hollow booming, as of some
mighty drum struck by a muffled fist.

A cry? Was that a cry, so distant and so faint? Beast-cry, or call of
night-bird, shrill and far?

Stern shuddered, and with redoubled haste once more pushed through the
vague path he and Beatrice had made from the barrens to Settlement
Miffs.

Presently, followed by the two colonists who dared not let him for a
moment out of their sight, he reached the brow of the canyon. His hand
flash-lamp showed him the rough path to the terrace.

With fast-beating heart he ran down it, unmindful of the unprotected
edge or the sheer drop to the rocks of New Hope River, far below.

Bremilu and Zangamon, seeing perfectly in the gloom, hurried close
behind, with words of awe, wonder and admiration in their own tongue.

"Beta! Oh, Beatrice! Home again!" Stern shouted triumphantly. "Where
are you, Beta? Come! I'm home again!"

Quickly he scrambled along the broken terrace, stumbling in his haste
over loose rocks and debris. Now he had reached the turn. The fire was
in sight.

"Beta!" again he hailed. "O-he! Beatrice!"

Still no answer, nor any sign from her. As he came to the fire he
noted, despite his strong emotions, that it had for the most part
burned down to glowing embers.

Only one or two resinous knots still flamed. It could not have been
replenished for some time, perhaps two hours or more.

Again, his quick eye caught the fact that cinders, ashes and
half-burned sticks lay scattered about in strange disorder.

"Why, Beatrice never makes a fire like that!" the thought pierced
through his mind.

And—though as yet on no very definite grounds—a quick prescience of
catastrophe battered at his heart.

"What's
this?
"

Something lying on the rock-ledge, near the fire, caught his eye. He
snatched it up.

"What—what can
this
mean?"

The colonists stood, frightened and confused, peering at him in the
dark. His face, in the ruddy fire-glow, as he studied the thing he now
held in his hand, must have been very terrible.

"
Cloth!
Torn! But—but
then
—"

He flung from him the bit of the girl's cloak which, ripped and
shredded as though by a powerful hand, cried disaster.

"Beatrice!" he shouted. "Where are you? Beatrice!"

To the doorway in the cliff he ran, shaken and trembling.

The stone had been pushed away; it lay inside the cave. Ominously the
black entrance seemed staring at him in the dull gleam of the
firelight.

On hands and knees he fell, and hastily crawled through. As he went,
he flashed his lamp here, there, everywhere.

"Beatrice!
Beatrice!
"

No answer.

In the far corner still flickered some remainder of the cooking-fire.
But there, too, ashes and half-burned sticks lay scattered all about.

To the bed he ran. It was empty and cold.

"Beatrice! Oh, my God!"

A glint of something metallic on the floor drew his bewildered,
terror-smitten gaze.

He sprang, seized the object, and for a moment stood staring, while
all about him the very universe seemed thundering and crashing down.

The object in his hand was the girl's gun. One cartridge, and only
one, had been exploded.

The barrel had been twisted almost off, as though by the wrenching
clutch of a hand inhuman in its ghastly power.

On the stock, distinctly nicked into the hard rubber as Stern held the
flash-lamp to it, were the unmistakable imprints of teeth.

With a groan, Allan started backward. The revolver fell with a clatter
to the cave floor.

His foot slid in something wet, something sticky.

"
Blood!
" he gasped.

Half-crazed, he reeled toward the door.

The flash-lamp in his hand flung its white brush of radiance along the
wall.

With a chattering cry he recoiled.

There, roughly yet unmistakably imprinted on the white limestone
surface, he saw the print, in crimson, of a huge, a horrible, a
brutally distorted hand.

Stern's cry of horror as he scrambled from the ravaged,
desecrated cave, and the ghastly horror of his face, seen by the
firelight, brought Zangamon and Bremilu to him, in terror.

"Master! Master! What—"

"My God! The girl—she's gone!" he stammered, leaning against the
cliff in mortal anguish.

"Gone, master? Where?"

"Gone! Dead, perhaps! Find her for me! Find her! You can see—in the
dark! I—I am as though blind! Quick, on the trail!"

"But tell us—"

"Something has taken her! Some savage thing! Some wild man! Even now
he may be killing her!
Quick—after them!
"

Bremilu stood staring for a moment, unable to grasp this catastrophe
on the very moment of arrival. But Zangamon, of swifter wit, had
already fallen on his knees, there by the mouth of the cave, and
now—seeing clearly by the dim light which more than sufficed for
him—was studying the traces of the struggle.

Stern, meanwhile, clutching his head between both hands, dumb-mad with
agony, was choking with dry sobs.

"Master! See!"

Zangamon held up a piece of splintered wood, with the bark deeply
scarred by teeth.

Stern snatched it.

"Part of the pole I gave her to brace the rock with," he realized.
"Even that was of no avail."

"Master—this way they went!"

Zangamon pointed up along the rock-terrace. Stern's eyes could
distinguish no slightest trace on the stone, but the Merucaan spoke
with certainty. He added:

"There was fighting, all the way along here, master. And then, here,
the girl was dragged."

Stern stumbled blindly after him as he led the way.

"There was fighting here? She struggled?"

"Yes, master."

"Thank God! She was alive here, anyhow! She wasn't killed in the cave.
Maybe, in the open, she might—"

"Now there is no more fighting, master. The wild thing carried her
here."

He pointed at the rock. Stern, trembling and very sick, flashed his
electric-lamp upon it. With eyes of dread and horror he looked for
blood-stains.

What? A drop! With a dull, shuddering groan, he pressed forward again.

Out he jerked his pistol and fired, straight up, their prearranged
signal: One shot, then a pause, then two. Some bare possibility
existed and that she still might live and hear and know that rescue
came—if it could come before it were eternally too late!

"On, on!" cried Allan. "Go on, Zangamon! Quick! Lead me on the trail!"

The Merucaan, now aided by Bremilu, who had recovered his wits,
scouted ahead like a blood-hound on the spoor of a fugitive. One
gripped his stone ax, the other a javelin.

Bent half double, scrutinizing in the dark the stony path which Allan
followed behind them only by the aid of his flash, they proceeded
cautiously up toward the brow of the cliff again.

But ere they reached the top they branched off onto another lateral
path, still rougher and more tortuous, that led along the breast of
the canyon.

"This way, master. It was here, most surely, the thing carried her."

"What kind of marks? Do you see signs of claws?"

"Claws? What are claws?"

"Sharp, long nails, like our nails, only much larger and longer. Do
you see any such marks?"

Zangamon paused a second to peer.

"I seem to see marks as of hands, master, but—"

"No matter! On! We must find her! Quick—lead the way!"

Five minutes of agonizing suspense for Allan brought him, still
following the guides, without whom all would have been utterly lost,
to a kind of thickly wooded dell that descended sharply to the edge of
the canyon. Into this the trail led.

Even he himself could now here and there make out, by the aid of his
light, a broken twig, trampled ferns and down-crushed grass. Once he
distinguished a blood-stain on a limb—fresh blood, not coagulated. A
groan burst from between his chattering teeth.

He turned his light on the grass beneath. All at once a blade moved.

"Oh, thank God!" he wheezed. "They passed here only a few minutes ago.
They can't be far now!"

Something drew his attention. He snatched at a sapling.

"Hair!"

Caught in a roughness of the bark a few short, stiff, wiry hairs,
reddish-brown, were twisted.

"
One of the Horde?
" he stammered.

A lightning-flash of memory carried him back to Madison Forest, more
than a year ago. He seemed to see again the obeah, as that monster
advanced upon the girl, clutching, supremely hideous.

"The hair! The same kind of hair! In the power of the Horde!" he
gasped.

A mental picture of extermination flashed before his mind's eye.
Whether the girl lived or died, he knew now that his life work was to
include a total slaughter of the Anthropoids. The destruction he had
already wrought among them was but child's play to what would be.

And in his soul flamed the foreknowledge of a hunt a
l'outrance, to the bitter end. So long as one, a single one of that
foul breed should live, he would not rest from killing.

"Master! This way! Here, master!"

The voice of Zangamon sent him once more crashing through the jungle,
after his questing guides. Again he fired the signal-shot, and now
with the full power of his lungs he yelled.

His voice rang, echoing, through the black and tangled growths,
startling the night-life of the depths. Something chippered overhead.
Near-by a serpent slid away, hissing venomously. Death lurked on every
hand.

Stern took no thought of it, but pressed forward, shouting the girl's
name, hallooing, beating down the undergrowth with mad fury. And here,
there, all about he flung the light-beam.

Perhaps she might yet hear his hails; perhaps she might even catch
some distant glimmer of his light, and know that help was coming, that
rescuers were fighting onward to her.

Silent, lithe, confident even among these new and terribly strange
conditions, the two men of the Folk slid through the jungle.

No hounds ever trailed fugitive more surely and with greater skill
than these strange, white barbarians from the underworld. Through all
his fear and agony, Stern blessed their courage and their skill.

"Men, by God! They're
men!
" he muttered, as he thrashed his painful
way behind them in the night.

Of a sudden, there somewhere ahead, far ahead in the wilderness—a
cry?

Allan stopped short, his heart leaping.

Again he fired, and his voice set all the echoes ringing.

A cry! He knew it now. There could be no mistake—
a cry!

"Beatrice!" he shouted in a terrible voice, leaping forward. The
guides broke into a crouching run. All three crashed through the
thickets, split the fern-masses, struggled through the tall
saber-grass that here and there rose higher than their heads.

Allan cursed himself for a fool. That other cry he had heard while on
his way from the Pauillac to Settlement Cliffs—that had been her cry
for help—and he had neither known nor heeded.

"Fool that I was! Oh, damnable idiot that I was!" he panted as he ran.

From moment to moment he fired. He paused a few seconds to jack a
fresh cartridge-clip into the automatic.

"Thank God I've got a belt full of ammunition!" thought he, and again
smashed along with the two Merucaans.

All at once a formidable roar gave them pause.

Hollow, booming, deep, yet rising to a wild shriek of rage and horrid
brutality, the beast-cry flung itself through the jungle.

And, following it, they heard again that muffled drumming, as though
gigantic fists were flailing a tremendous tambour in the darkness.

"Master!" whispered Zangamon, recoiling a step. "Oh, Kromno, what is
that?
"

"Never have we heard such in our place!" added Bremilu, gripping his
ax the tighter. "Is that a man-cry, or the cry of a beast—one of the
beasts you told us of, that we have never seen?"

"Both! A man-beast! Kill! Kill!"

Now, Allan, sure of his direction, took the lead. No longer he flashed
the light, and only once more he called:

"Beatrice! O Beatrice! We're coming!"

Again he heard her cry, but suddenly it died as though swiftly choked
in her very throat. Allan spat a blasphemy and surged on.