Priestess of Murder (2 page)

But there was the upstairs yet, the upstairs that was blacker, as Leila's
dilated pupils stared up into its mystery, because of the luminescence about
her. No longer was it the warm, familiar bedroom floor of the old house but a
precinct of stygian gloom haunted by some darkness-shrouded threat.

The girl's small fingers—tightened on the newel post to which she
clung, tightened till the blood was driven from them and they were grey,
trembling splotches against the lustrous patina of the wood. It was only the
dark, up there, of which she was afraid. Over and over she told it to
herself. It was only because of the dark that she had that hint of evil
lurking just beyond the stair head, of monstrous evil crouched just beyond
the range of her vision, haunched and waiting to pounce upon her. There was
nothing more in the corridor above, Leila assured herself, than shadows like
the eerie phantoms that had fled from the lights she had turned on.

Nothing? A shriek sliced down to her, the high, shrill scream of a woman
in deadly terror.

It checked off, faded into vague thumpings as of a fierce struggle, into
the thud of a storm-tossed branch against the building wall.
It came
again!

Tiny muscles twitched in Leila's cheeks. Insensate, humorless laughter
sounded in her fluttering throat. It was the wind that had screamed from up
there, tightening her scalp with fear. It must have been the wind. No one
could possibly be up there.

But she was afraid. Afraid to go up there and look. Afraid of the storm
and the dark.

A sharp crackle jerked her around. She stared wide-eyed at the entrance
door. Fool! That had been only the splintering of a gale-riven
branch—It came again. Unmistakable this time. The crunch of a heel on
the gravel pathway outside!

A foot thudded on the porch just beyond the door and unseen fingers
rattled the door knob. Through a crashing peal of thunder the terrified girl
heard a threatening, hoarse bellow. Someone was just the other side of the
sturdy portal. Some one—The killer! The mad killer, seeking her!

He bellowed again, pounded wild fists on the wood. The great panel
shuddered under the berserk attack. Its hinges creaked. The furious pounding
piled a frenzied terror on her fear of the storm and the dark. Realization
pierced her that only five feet of air, two inches of wood, separated her
from the monstrous creature that had made of Shean Rourke a mangled horror.
It twisted her about, sent her hurtling headlong up the stairs that a moment
before dread had barred to her, sent her dashing through the lightless
corridor in instinctive flight to the fancied sanctuary of her own
bedroom.

Her hand clutched the knob of its door, swung her to it. Frantically she
thrust open the panel, slammed it shut behind her, leaned back against it,
gasping, quivering.

Rain lashed against the window pane, threshed on the roof above her.
Dulled by distance, the savage pounding on the door below beat about Leila as
though tangible blows buffeted her. Momentarily the lightning had ceased. The
chamber was obliterated by tar-barrel darkness. A feeling grew on Leila that
she was not alone here.

Leila Monroy whimpered, stabbed blindly at the light-switch she knew
jutted from the wall to her right. The small room sprang into sight. A
disheveled apparition stared at her from her dresser mirror, russet wealth of
hair tumbling about her now pallid face, mouth twisting and livid, grey eyes
dark with the frenzy of her terror. She pulled her gaze from it, saw the
bed—

Crumpled on its scarlet-flecked counterpane lay the contorted body of a
girl. Blue-black hair veiled her face, but where a pink frock had been
cruelly torn away, lurid finger-marks on a white throat showed the manner of
her death. Her death—there was no motion, no movement at all in the
awful stillness of the pathetic figure. The exposed, blanched breast stirred
with not the slightest breath.

"Eve," Leila whimpered, unable to do no more than stare and whimper.
"Eve..."

Forgotten the tumult of the storm, the battering at the entrance door.
Forgotten everything but the horror that burst within her skull. But she had
no memory of Eve's arrival. No memory...

Time must have dropped out of her consciousness. Time enough for her to
have summoned the girl, to have lured her up here! Time enough—for her
own hands to have clenched on her friend's throat, to have pressed, pressed,
until life no longer throbbed beneath her throttling fingers!

IT seemed to Leila Monroy that she could feel, in her icy
palms, memory of the soft flesh's slow crumple beneath their lethal
construction. Once she had hated Eve, when the girl quite openly had tried to
win Stan Corbett away from her. That jealous hatred had passed away with her
own triumph and they had been friends again. Had it passed? Had it not rather
sprung to sinister existence with the blood madness inherited from the father
they had led away to a padded cell?

Darkness smashed down as the light went out. The window was momentarily a
blue oblong, flickering with the electric radiance of lightning.

"Leila!" A voice came up to her. "Open up. It's Stan, Leila. Stan!"

Stan! He had come for her as he had come for her father. He had come to
drag her, shrieking, to the same chamber of horrors where Justin Moore had
agonized.

He would have to catch her first! If she were mad she would avail herself
of a lunatic's cunning. From a window at the end of the passage rain-spout
clamps made an easy ladder to the ground. The storm would hide her, she would
bury herself in the woods—Leila got the door open behind her, flung out
into the hall.

Thunderous crash of the portal below met her, and the tempest's howl,
blasting in through the house. The sound whirled her startled glance in its
direction. The stairs were in darkness.

Stan's feet thudded on the steps, coming up.

Lightning glimmer threw Stan's climbing shadow against the wall, made
visible the face of a crouching figure. It was the grizzled, distorted face
of Foster Corbett! Of Stan's own father! Waiting for his son with a revolver
uplifted in his hand!

"Stan!" Leila screamed. "Look out He's—"

A shout drowned her out, a blast of bestial fury. Somewhere a shot blazed,
and then the world crashed in on her. She fell headlong into a limbo of
whirling, coruscating sparks. She felt herself lifted in powerful arms, felt
herself thrown over a heaving shoulder. Shouts, shots, echoed about her, a
gibbering chatter of apelike defiance. Rain drenched her, an icy gale pounded
at her. Oblivion claimed her.

AT last Leila dared to lift her lids, bit by slow bit. She
blinked. Darkness was about her, strangely mottled with glancing fragments of
silvery light. Darkness, and glistening, dank rock above her. The earthy
smell of a tomb in her nostrils.

She was, it dawned on her, in a shallow cave. The luminous flecks dancing
about her were splotches of moonlight shifting through the leaves of high
trees. A cave! Trees! This must be West Cliff, then.

Leila thrust herself up to a sitting posture as terror sliced her. Was
this the cave of the Monster? But there wasn't any Monster, she thought.
There was only the crazed slayer who had hacked Shean Rourke with an ax, who
had throttled Eve Starr, who had crouched with lethal gun to shoot down Stan
Corbett. Not any phantom Monster! Not Justin Monroy either, nor Leila
herself. Foster Corbett!

For a moment Leila forgot her pain, her danger, in the jubilance of that
revelation. Dad was no maniac killer, nor—was she. It was Foster
Corbett who had schemed with the cunning of the insane to slay and place the
blame for his crime on the man he hated. Foster Corbett who had dragged a
second victim to Leila Monroy's bed so that the daughter should be doomed to
the same terrible fate to which he had condemned the father. Foster Corbett
who, losing all hold on reason, had haunched in the storm-battered corridor,
waiting to kill his own son!

Had he? Had he added filicide to the role of his crimes? A shot had blazed
across her scream of warning just before the madman had whirled to attack
her! If Stan had fired it, the maniac could not have moved so swiftly. It had
been fired at Stan, then, had buried itself in his breast? In the breast of
the man she loved?

Loved. Leila Monroy, springing to her feet knew terribly that her love for
Stan was not dead. A sob tore at her throat. She must go to him. Reckless of
the agony that seared through her she started forward to the cave's
entrance.

Then she froze as a rattle of rolling pebbles came up to her from below
the cavern mouth! Of stones dislodged by some one climbing the face of the
cliff.

He was coming for her. He had borne her here, left her here while he
pursued some other dreadful mission of his murder-lusting brain, and now he
was returning to work his mad will upon her.

Helpless? Leila Monroy's lip snarled up from her tiny teeth. She was
suddenly a creature of the wilds. The desperate courage of hopelessness
entered into her, the feral cunning of wildernesses small beasts who will
fight, must fight, when escape from their persecutors has become no longer
possible. She stooped, snatched handfuls of jagged stones from the cave
floor, flitted to its entrance, silent as a cloud.

Leila peered out and down, slyly cautious. There he was! Like a huge,
black spider clinging to the splattered, bare precipice. Working his way up,
indomitably, slowly by the necessity of finding handholds, footholds, in the
bare, sheer rock face. Hidden now by a pool of stygian shadow, revealed now
by fragments of leaf-splintered moonlight. Inexorably climbing to add her to
the dreadful list of his victims.

Distorted by the eerie light he was somehow unhuman, somehow a monster of
primitive evil, spewed out of the past. And Leila Monroy, the weak thing he
hunted, was primitive, too. Primitive and pitiless. Her hand flew back, arced
forward. A stone left it—and struck fair on the skull of the maniac!
The crunch of its landing came up to her, sickened her, but she flung another
stone and another. A dark splotch appeared on his forehead, and then the man
let go his holds, plunged down, a black, sprawling figure, crashed terribly
in the underbrush below.

A thrill of triumph ran through Leila, a hot thrill of triumph that was a
torrid flame boiling in her blood. Her laugh, bubbled up in the dark silence
of the forest. A shrill, thin cachinnation of black laughter, spilling from
her gaping throat, rioting out in the rain-washed night.

It was horrifying! Her throat clamped on it. She checked it, icy with
loathing of the savagery that had inspired it, quivering with revulsion at
the thing she had become. She had killed a man and laughed with joy at the
deed. She, Leila Monroy! Cliff and forest whirled about her in a sudden
vertigo. The hot flush of joy at Corbett's thumping fall, the jubilant
laughter, were these the reactions of sanity? Soaring glee at killing—
only a lunatic could feel it, only a homicidal maniac.

"Murder! While insane!" What if the incredible acts she had ascribed to
Foster Corbett were fetid illusions of her own darkened mind? What if she
were, in deed, the lunatic slayer and he a good neighbor trying to save her
from herself, the victim of her mania? What if her hand, that had slain him,
was gory already with the blood of Eve Starr and of Stan!

No! Not Stan! That, at least, was clear to her even in her bewilderment.
If Stan were slain she could not have slain him. There was the test. Only a
madman would kill his own son. Corbett or she. She or Corbett. If Stan were
alive, she was the maniac. If he were dead—

If he were dead—the thought slashed at her like a sword. That she
should hope for his death—her Stan! Broad-shouldered, upstanding,
frank-eyed. No! Rather that she be condemned to the eternal perdition of
raving madness, rather that she take a knife and slice it across her own
throat... Bullets do not always kill! Was he lying there, wounded,
desperately wounded, suffering? Not dead but bleeding to death while she
dallied here, delaying the aid that might save him?

Leila licked dry lips with a trembling tongue. She was down on her knees
on the narrow ledge that made a sort of porch to the cave. She swung over it,
was scrambling for footing against the sheer wall of the rock, was inching
down that perilous descent, while weakness was like water in her limbs, while
pain was a network of agony meshing her frail form.

"Stan!"

His name was a prayer on her lips as she attained the cliff's foot at
last, as she sent one shuddering glance at the still mound, blacker against
black, that her missiles had flung there. "Stan!"

She plunged into the thicket.

A twisted root caught Leila's foot, pounded her headlong into the mire.
She lay as she fell, heaving in great breaths of the dank air to her tortured
lungs, fighting for strength to rise, to go on. The forest silence closed in
on her, a black pall of soundlessness.

Not altogether soundless. A vague, ominous slither threaded it. It lifted
Leila's head with a jerk, despite the darts of agony shooting through her at
even that slight effort. It pulled her burning stare through the tree-boles
that were grotesque giants reaching writhing arms down to pluck her from her
miry bed.

And then her scalp suddenly tightened.

It drifted almost silently toward her; wraithlike, phantasmal... A vagrant
beam caught it full—and a scream formed in Leila's breast, tore her
constricted throat, died at her lips.

The phantom of Eve Starr was gliding toward her between the ebon trees.
Eve Starr, whose corpse Leila had seen contorted in awful death on the
gore-stained counterpane of her own bed!

LEILA MONROY'S blood jelled within her veins. Supernal
terror squeezed her heart as the apparition's ghastly approach held her eyes
with the appalled but helpless stare of a reptile-fascinated bird.