Daughters of Dark Desire

By Hugh B. Cave

from the Dec. 1935 issue of Dime Mystery

“/ cannot help myself, Laura, ” muttered Peter Langdon brokenly, even as his hands were curving about the throat of the girl he loved with all his heart. For even the accursed spell that was upon the young people in that doomed town held no such terrors for them as did the displeasure of the stone-faced horror that was their master.

A STRANGE thing, this sensation called fear. It means little until it strikes close to home; then, becoming terror, it sickens the soul and turns the heart to ice.

It was that way with Peter Langdon. He had known, of course, of the evil malady which was spreading through Cannadale. For days the newspapers had carried unlovely reports and photographs of young men and women who had fallen prey to the hellish spell. But the evil had not struck close to home yet, and so was not terror.

It struck with full force that evening when Laura Welkin, his fiancee, stared at him so strangely in the seclusion of her living-room and said in a faltering whisper: “I feel it coming closer to me, Peter! I’m so afraid! This morning—”

“This morning?” Peter said, scowling. “Yes?”

“My own cousin! She acted so strangely! When she came downstairs she was like a wanton woman, and I saw hunger in her eyes…. Even father noticed it—and then she went to him and kissed him, the way some women kiss their lovers. She laughed in a queer, terrible way while she did it, and I saw horror come into father’s eyes. He—he carried Jane to her room and locked her in. “

“You mean she is locked in her room now?”

“Yes, Peter. We don’t dare let her out. So many others…. “

Peter Langdon stared with widening eyes into his sweetheart’s terrified face and remembered the newspaper accounts which had until now meant little to him. Headlines had screamed their black tales of victims who had become slaves to the mad lust. Columns of newsprint told of young men, young women wandering the night-shrouded streets of Cannadale—respectable men and women caught in a whirlpool of madness and darkest desire.

Some had been apprehended and returned to their homes, their clothing torn, their bodies clawed and gouged and mutilated by unknown hands of unimaginable evil. Others had disappeared….

Now the horror had invaded the home of Laura Welkin and claimed a new victim….

‘“We’ve got to help her, ” Peter said grimly.

As though resigned to the knowledge that nothing could be done, Laura nodded wearily. “Father has gone to Marlboro to bring back a specialist. The doctors here can do nothing. They’ve tried to cure others, and failed. You must go home, Peter. It’s late. Aunt Millicent will be angry. “

FEAR walked with Peter Langdon through the streets of Cannadale. Was it safe to leave Laura alone in that big house with an eccentric old aunt and a young girl who had become possessed? Laura’s father was in Marlboro, a hundred miles away. If the night brought creeping shadows, would locked doors and windows keep them at bay?

Creeping shadows! They were abroad now, stalking him through the murk! His own home lay on the other side of the city, more than a mile from here, and that mile snaked crookedly through the city’s downtown section and through slum-streets near the river front.

He went slowly, striving to make himself believe that his intended wife was in no danger. She wasn’t in danger, of course. This was a civilized city where policemen were paid to provide protection. People here were safe.

But newspaper headlines danced in his brain, tormenting him, and he knew that for the past few weeks people here had been safe. That vile disease, if disease it were, had claimed too many. Men and women had been lured into the night, had been found—some of them— wandering nearly mad, their bodies mutilated by marks of torture. And at least one reputable physician—Dr. Arnold Coleman—had declared his grim belief that the tortures were self-inflicted.

Shadows… creeping in the dark. More than once Peter turned to peer behind him, certain that some sinister shape was dogging his steps. Passing pedestrians were silent ghosts in an unsavory murk, and around him were the frowning, evil-smelling tenements of Cannadale’s slums, through which he must pass.

He quickened his pace. Always before, he had enjoyed prowling through this district, for it was like peering into an alien world inhabited by strange, uncouth denizens of squalor. But now the shadows were reaching out to clutch at him, and the fear in his heart had become a strangling weight.

Ahead, something sidled crookedly from a tenement house doorway and moved toward him, to block his path.

Peter swayed to a dead stop and stood staring. It was dark here. That furtive prowler had chosen a murky no-man’s land of gloom between the pale halos of far-apart street lamps in which to accost him. There was an eerie sound of wind front the river-front moaning against tall buildings, and up ahead, beyond the ochre puddle of the second street lamp and beyond that slouching, advancing shape of shadow, a scarlet and black sign creaked on rusty hinges above the doorway of a pawn shop.

A cold wet mist rode the breeze and slid clamily across Peter’s stiff face as if seeking something there. Cold as it was, it failed to cool the burning thickness in his throat as he waited with big body swaying and feet glued to the unclean sidewalk.

That advancing shape was a woman. Realizing that, he was vaguely relieved and moved forward to go past her, for she had stopped and was apparently timid about coming closer.

She was the one who seemed afraid now, and he wondered why. She was young; well dressed. Was she lost here in the slums and trying to find her way out? Was she….

Peter Langdon stiffened with a sudden gasp of breath and realized that the girl was ill. She was stumbling toward him, but she was not going to make it! He sprang forward. The girl staggered, pitched to her knees on the sidewalk and swayed there, sobbing. And then Peter’s hands were clutching her arm

“What’s wrong?” he cried anxiously “What’s the matter?”

THE girls lips mumbled some sort of answer but he did not hear it. Horror filled his widening eyes. He stared down at her trembling body, and even the darkness failed to hide the fact that the front of her dress had been ripped open. Her half-exposed breasts were torn, bleeding, where cruel fingers had gouged strips of flesh from her young body. Her own fingers, clutching at him, were red with fresh blood!

“Good God!” Peter muttered.

She was clawing at him now with sharp nails, as if suddenly afraid that he might jerk free and leave her. She spoke his name, in a low, husky voice, and the voice was turbulent with dark passion.

Wide-eyed with horror, he stared at the girl’s mutilated breasts, heard again the grim voice of Dr. Arnold Coleman stating an opinion which few people had given credence to. “I tell you, ” Coleman had growled, examining a recent victim, “these marks of torture are a result of masochistic madness! They are self-imposed!”

Good God, had this girl mutilated herself? Was she mad?

Mad or not, she possessed a strength that seemed impossible in one so young, so terribly wounded. “Wait a while, will you?” she said softly, dragging Peter closer. “What’s your… hurry? Maybe we can be friends. “

Peter stood very, still, very stiff, and returned the girl’s stare.

She had been attractive once. Even the darkness could not hide that. Her satin skin and sleek black hair showed unmistakable evidence of having been carefully cared for. But the gaze of those dark eyes was like a dank breeze from the river, coldly and sensually searching his face. He shuddered from it.

“You want to be friends, don’t you?” the girl demanded. “I’m good looking enough ?”

Good looking? She was, despite an alabaster paleness which told of some lurking illness. But there was something more. He knew this girl! He had met her before under far different circumstances!

And she was on her feet now, dragging him across the sidewalk hauling him toward the doorway from which she had emerged. Scowling, he put his hands on her shoulders and forcibly swung her to face him, peered more closely.

The yellow glow of the street lamp showed him her face. “My God!” he gasped. “Jane!”

Jane! Jane Berkely, Laura’s cousin. But Laura had said that this girl was even now locked in her room, for fear that she might go wandering into the streets and become a creature of mad lust, as others had done before her. This couldn’t be Jane!

She was gazing at him queerly, almost savagely. “Well, what’s the matter with you?” she demanded. “What if my name is Jane? You’re a man and I’m a woman. Isn’t that enough?”

Peter Langdon looked into her hunger-twisted face and felt a slow, numbing stream of horror course through him. This girl, Laura’s cousin? This strange, fiery-eyed woman whose half-naked bosom was red with blotches of blood where savage fingers had torn away flesh? It wasn’t—couldn’t be—true! Yet the girl herself had used the name Jane, called herself by it!

He pulled her closer, and she misunderstood his meaning. “Now you’re being sensible, ” she whispered eagerly. “Love me, Peter! No one will ever know!”

“I’m taking you to a doctor!”

“No, no! I have a room where we can be alone. “

“You’re going with me, I say!”

She realized that he meant it. Her staring eyes filled with quick dark rage. “You fool!” she screamed. “I offer you my love and you refuse! What kind of man are you?”

Words would be futile—Peter knew that. This girl was insane with desire. Curling hard fingers around her arm, he dragged her along the sidewalk.

Snarling, kicking, she went with him. Only because she had to. That little body possessed unusual strength; bared teeth sought with animal hunger to fasten on the hands that held her. “Damn you, let me go!” she screamed at him. “I won’t be taken back there and locked in again!”

He ignored her screams, ignored even the vile epithets she flung at him. When he stopped, it

was because of something else—because in the gloom before him where river mist yellowed by lamplight hung like a huge festering sore in the night, a silent shape had suddenly detached itself from the wall and was striding forward. And there was a face swimming in the mist….

Men are afraid of things they do not understand. Peter, staring, was suddenly and tremblingly afraid of the face, because it was unreal.

Still clinging tenaciously to the woman beside him, he gaped in wide-eyed terror at the thing which glided toward him. Jane Berkely stopped squirming, ceased spitting epithets. The shadowed street was full of the slow, hollow thumping of the thing’s footsteps, and breath rattled in Peter’s throat. He wanted then to run. The night itself, it seemed, screamed at him that this approaching stranger was the embodiment of all things evil, was somehow connected with the hideous disease which had swept through Cannadale.

That face was cold and grey, a mask carved of stone possessing eyes like globules of wet hard tar which had caught and held the feeble gleam of the street lamp. It swayed closer….

PETER LANGDON jerked his flaccid limbs into action and turned trembling toward the curb, to pass that advancing shape without walking closer than was necessary. He had no need now to drag Jane with him; she came willingly, staring with fearful expectancy at the stone-faced thing in the gloom. Did she too sense the menace in those unblinking eyes? Did she know the man?

Peter clung to her and strode forward, through a stench-laden mist that blurred his gaze and distorted the swimming face into something greyishly inhuman. Again be suddenly wanted to rush madly, screaming, in the opposite direction. But why? What was there to be afraid of? Simply because this gaunt-faced stranger had appeared so abruptly out of the night’s gloom, was that any reason to suspect him of being some sinister monster spawned by the night itself?

“Come!” Peter said to the girl.

But Jane Berkely was not willing to go with him. Not any longer. Her feet had jarred to a halt on the wet sidewalk and she was staring at the approaching shape the way a hypnotized bird might stare at the gliding coils of some sinuous snake.

“Come!” Peter rasped. And suddenly the stranger was standing before him, staring.

“You are in trouble?

“In trouble?” Peter stared wildly into the man’s unblinking eyes. “Yes, yes, I’m in trouble! This girl is ill—terribly ill! For God’s sake get help, will you? Call an ambulance, a cab—”

“An ambulance? I think that is not necessary. ” The voice came through the mist, out of stonelike lips that hung there, distorted, in the street lamp’s farthest reaching tentacle of light. The lips seemed hardly to twitch, yet the voice came low and distinct between them, and the face swam nearer. “I think I know what is wrong with her, my friend, and I am sure that I myself can attend to her better than any doctor. “

Peter Langdon shrank back, peering into a face that seemed made of stone: a face whose shrunken cheeks and broad, slanting forehead were as hard and grey as granite. Only the glittering eyes, staring now into Jane Berkely’s terrified countenance, possessed anything like life.

“I think she will go with me. “

Peter heard the words, felt their horrible connection with the terror in Cannadale. Then he was hearing another voice, his own, snarling harshly: “You get to hell out of here! Get out!”

The eyes smiled at him. A very old man might have smiled that way at the ridiculous ravings of a small child. “You do not seem to understand. I have come for the young lady, to take her with me. “

Something very cold, very dreadful, lurked in the quiet of those slurred words, yet Peter released his hold on the girl’s arm and thrust himself forward. It would be easy to push this unwelcome stranger aside. The man was short, stumpy; beneath those mist-dampened garments his body must surely be a puny thing without much strength. Only his face seemed strong— hard and inflexible as granite.

“Move on, ” Peter said grimly, clamping a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Take yourself out of here before I lose my temper. “

The man smiled gently, almost without moving the muscles of his face. “You are not strong enough to send me away, ” he said.

PETER LANGDON’S temper broke its bonds. His clenched fist swept up from belt-level, sweeping through the mist to crash savagely, powerfully, against the face that swam there. It was a good fist; many men would have been proud of the strength behind it. And the target, hanging there like a grey gargoyle, did not jerk away.

The fist crashed home with a hard, grinding thud. Agony surged into Peter’s rigid wrist, coursed upward through his arm. He gasped a cry of pain and swayed on stiff legs, staring. Striking that stony face had been like swinging a mighty fist into a concrete wall! And the face was still smiling!

“You are not strong enough, ” the thin lips murmured, “to hurt me. “

Swift as a striking serpent, the man moved. Steel fingers closed over Peter’s wrist, jerking him forward. He knew then, with blinding terror, that the power in that puny body was greater than his own. But how could that be?

He fought! There on a mist-wet sidewalk where midnight’s gloom was relieved only by far-apart street lamps, he fought in sobbing desperation to defend himself. Steel hands were at his throat, strangling him and while he twisted in torment the granite face of his assailant hung before him, expressionless except for that lingering, perhaps indelible smile of mockery.

His fists beat a frantic tattoo against the man’s chest, hurting themselves more than they harmed their target. Good God, what was this man? Was he an unearthly visitant from some dark world where men were created of stone? Did the blows of those hammering human fists harm him not at all?

In agony Peter saw the white, startled face of Jane Berkely and knew that the girl was standing against the wall of the building, her hands curled in terror against the mounds of her slashed breasts. She too seemed to know the inevitable outcome of the battle, yet seemed unable to flee. In a moment more those granite hands would clutch the quivering flesh of her own cringing body…

Darkness swirled before Peter’s bulging eyes. He no longer beat at the smiling face of his assailant; instead, his hands clawed futilely at those other hands which were throttling him, while agony seared his struggling body…

No man could break the grip of those murderous fingers. On his knees, writhing, Peter hurled himself against the creature’s legs, hoping

to hurl that rigid body off balance and then sprawl on top of it. Lights danced in his brain and a sound of low laughter, laden with mockery, gibbered at his ears. It was so useless now, so horribly futile. Nothing on earth could loosen the clutch of the hands that were killing him. And the darkness was deeper, filled with sounds of torment that must surely be groaning from his own bloody lips….

The hands did release their hold. One of them slid higher, fastening itself in Peter Langdon’s hair. From beneath, a bludgeon hard as iron swept through the crimson murk and crashed against Peter’s chin while he knelt there. The bludgeon was a knee—a human knee as solid, destroying, as a thing of iron hardened in the hell of a blast furnace.

Peter shot over backward, slid in a twisted heap across the wet pavement and rolled grotesquely into the gutter, arms flailing like the wings of a crippled bat. Half conscious he lay writhing in a bed of foul water that whispered an echo to the triumphant soft laughter of the fiend who stood over him. Silently the man moved away.

And then a woman was screaming! Jane Berkely—shrieking in frantic fear as those granite hands dragged her from the wall. Clawing and kicking, she pulled relentlessly toward the black doorway from which the monster had first emerged.

CHAPTER TWO

Hand of Stone

PETER LANGDON lay moaning in the murk of the gutter while eternities passed and agony subsided in the depths of his tortured body. Terror labored within him; again he felt that overpowering desire to run, to keep on running until the crowding shadows were left far behind. Yet other shadows, equally venomous, lurked in every direction. There was no escape…

Terror and pain are companionate creators of delusions, leading men’s minds along strange warped passageways of darkness! Peter Langdon mouthed the name of the girl he loved, and moaned to a god of mercy to save her from the clutches of the monster who he thought had carried her away.

“Laura! Oh God, Laura…. !”

His confused brain had forgotten that it was not Laura, but her cousin, Jane, who had fallen victim to the monster….

Later, the sidewalk of that shadowed street echoed a slow and heavy thud of approaching footsteps, and through the yellow murk of far-apart street lamps strode a tall, stoop-shouldered figure who walked in a world of his own.

Looking neither to right nor left, the man trudged methodically through gloom, the collar of his heavy suit-coat turned high to keep out the night. Tall and spare, possessing a bearded face in which the eyes were half closed with weariness, the man mumbled to himself as he walked—and then, hearing the moans of Peter Langdon, he stopped and turned with a jerk that shook the drowsiness out of him.

He stared with widening eyes as Peter’s fumbling hand clawed feebly on the curb.

The street lamp’s wandering glow showed him Peter’s face.

“Langdon! Good heavens!”

Peter peered dully into that swooping face and mumbled thickly: “Coleman. Doctor Coleman. Thank God. ” And then strong hands hauled him across the sidewalk and propped him where the wall of the building would hold him erect. Coleman blurted questions.

And Peter screamed out the madness in his soul.

“Laura! The fiend took Laura away from me, Coleman! For God’s sake go after her; bring her back before something horrible—”

Delusions—spawned by terror and pain and by those granite fingers which while twisting Peter’s throat had also twisted his brain.

Arnold Coleman had been a physician for years and worked now at the Cannadale Hospital. Mental cases were not new to him. “What are you talking about?” he said curtly.

“Laura! The man with the stone face took her!”

“You’re ill, ” Coleman growled. “I’ve just come from Laura’s house; went there to have a talk with her father, but he wasn’t at home. She was home though, and couldn’t possibly have been here in

the slums at the same time. You’re quite mistaken. “

“No, no, Coleman. I tell you—”

Arnold Coleman made clucking sounds with his tongue and shook his head sideways. For a doctor he had very little patience. Suspicion was in the peering eyes under his furrowed brows, and he said quietly: “You’re in bad shape, Langdon. Drunk, were you?” Then, clamping strong hands under Peter’s armpits and lifting him erect: “Home is the place for you. Home and in bed. Come!”

Peter had no strength to resist with, yet tried to wrench himself free. As he fought, tears drenched his twisted face and words croaked from his bloody lips. “I won’t go home! My God, Coleman, I’ve got to find her!”

For answer, Coleman murmured the same soothing words he might have used on some hysterical patient at the hospital. Then he pulled the struggling figure along with him. Peter, sobbing with each stumbling step, could not resist.

Along dark streets Coleman led him, ever away from that evil doorway. When a prowling cab crept past he signaled, then bundled his dazed patient into it and said curtly to the driver: “The Langdon residence, East Side. ” No further directions were necessary. The Langdons, in Cannadale, were important and wealthy.

“Just to prove to you that nothing has happened to your sweetheart, ” Coleman said, as they rode, “I’ll phone her when I get you home, and you can talk to her yourself. “

HE did that, after leading Peter up the high white steps of the Langdon residence and half-pushing, half-carrying him into the living-room. Still dazed, Peter slumped there on a sofa and stared dully into the face of Bernice Marnell, his father’s secretary who came at Coleman’s call, from her bed-chamber on the floor above. But tonight, he had no eyes for the dark beauty of the face that hovered above him. Instead he saw only the softer, less mature features of the girl who had promised soon to be his wife—and in his mind the belief that Laura was lost to him grew to a numbing certainty.

“She won’t answer the phone, ” he mumbled. “She’s not there to answer it. That fiend took her… “

“What is it, Peter?” The eyes of Bernice Marnell—dark, liquid eyes filled now with

compassion—searched his twitching face anxiously. “Tell me what happened. “

Ordinarily he would have been eager to reach out to her for comfort. She was like a sister to him, this woman. In the beginning she had come here to work for Joshua Langdon, but for years now she had been so much a member of the family that even bonds of birth could have drawn her no closer.

And she was beautiful in a way that few women, even Laura, could ever hope to be, with luxuriant black hair and shadowed eyes that seemed always to be glowing with strange warmth. Only the deformity of her left foot marred that loveliness—and perhaps God had done that intentionally, knowing that without it He might have created too perfect a woman.

The clubfoot scraped now, as Bernice limped from the room to bring water with which to wash the purpling wounds in Peter’s throat. Dully he looked toward the hall doorway and heard the rasping click of the dial as Coleman, for the third time, sought a response from the home of Laura Welkin.

“She won’t answer, ” Peter mumbled. “We’re wasting time..: “

Coleman, pacing over the threshold, scowled and said irritably: “They must be asleep. But I tell you she was there when I left, and nothing could have happened!”

Peter was erect, swaying. “Nothing—could have happened!” The words came bitterly, harshly. “Damn you, Coleman, I told you to leave me alone back there in the slums! Now it may be too late!”

Even Coleman could not stop him then. A measure of strength had returned sluggishly to Peter’s big body. Staggering, he flung the doctor aside and blundered to the door. When Coleman tried again to halt him, Peter’s clenched fist raised a livid welt on the man’s cheek and sent him crashing to the wall.

It was not far to the slums. There might still be time if only he could find that dark doorway! If only he could find it before Laura became completely enslaved to the disease which had claimed so many others….

TERROR rode Peter’s hunched shoulders as he went prowling into the slums. He talked to himself incoherently. On the corner of that street of mystery, a sidewalk clock said two A. M.

Somewhere along here was the doorway—the black chasm where Laura had been dragged, screaming after stone hands had beaten Peter Langdon to submission. Now there was no sound except the ceaseless mutter of rain and the gurgle of water in unclean gutters. But somewhere, a doorway….

He lurched toward the glow of a familiar street lamp and stopped sluggishly, aware that there was a sound in the street’s dark stillness. An alien sound of high heels tapping quickly, nervously in the gloom ahead!

Hope blazed in Peter’s eyes. High heels? A woman, then—and the woman might be the one he sought! Surely at this hour, in a district so renowned for its perils, no girl would be just out for a stroll!

He saw her then, but at that distance could not be sure. The girl walked as if afraid—a trim, rain-wet figure tapping hurriedly along the pavement, into the yellow blotch of light flung from the lamp above. Her head was lowered to the sweep of the rain, her face hidden. Unaware yet of Peter’s presence, she came toward him, past a certain murky doorway which to Peter was a place of evil. And then—she was no longer alone! From the shadows of that doorway a crouching shape detached itself, leaped forward with the sudden gliding attack of a wolf!

The cry of warning that rose in Peter’s throat was smothered by the girl’s scream of terror as she whirled. Too late she flung herself sideways; too late Peter lurched forward, striving to hurl himself across the intervening space in time.

That lean, snarling shape had swept the screaming girl into its arms, was dragging her now toward the deeper gloom of the doorway. Her screams were smothered under a cruel hand; the fiend’s other hand was tearing at the wet garments that covered her slender body!

Peter surged forward, bellowing hoarsely in a throat tight with returning terror. “Laura!” Good God, if the girl were Laura—!

She was on her knees now, screaming for help while with furious hands her assailant bared the cringing flesh of her shoulders. When Peter charged, the monster turned his head and glared. A gasp of relief choked in Peter’s throat. That hungry face was not made of stone! It was human!

He, Peter Langdon, could hurl this man aside without being strangled by granite hands and left writhing in the gutter….

Then other shapes erupted out of the gloom. Uniformed shapes. Policemen! And the girl’s assailant was lurching erect, standing now with his back to the wall.

He had no chance, yet he fought with the fury of a trapped tiger. Strong hands tore him away from the girl who lay sobbing on the sidewalk at his feet. Nightsticks shattered his fists when he battled for freedom. Other fists as powerful as his own felled him and battered him to submission… and then he was hauled erect, slammed against the wall and pinned there.

Peter Langdon, stumbling forward, gaped with horrified eyes into the man’s bloody countenance.

It was not a stone face nor was it old. Before lust had claimed it, it had been the face of a decent, clean-living fellow of about twenty-five. But now the fellow’s big chest was heaving enormously beneath the open front of his shirt, and Peter saw through a mist of horror that the chest was mutilated.

Mutilated! Not bruised by the fists of the policemen or by their nightsticks, but torn and gouged and gashed by something sharper—by fingernails, perhaps, or by hellish instruments of torture!

The man’s chest and face and arms were carmine with blood, and the blood was seeping from wounds which Doctor Coleman would say were self-inflicted.

“It’s Granville, ” Peter said dully. “It’s—Jack Granville. “

One of the policemen stared at him, recognized him and said tersely: “We been keeping an eye on this guy for the last hour or so. You know him, Mr. Langdon?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. ” Stiff with amazement, Peter fought to clear his brain of the mist that had enveloped it. “He—he’s engaged to my sister. ” The words had no life behind them, came as if uttered in sleep.

Jack Granville, an attacker of helpless women! It couldn’t be true! This man, pinned here against the wall and staring now in dull, stupid bewilderment as if unaware of the crime he had been about to commit, this man must be someone who looked like Jack Granville. Not Jack himself! But there was no mistake….

Peter swayed forward, peered into the fellow’s face. For more than a year now, Granville had been engaged to Peter’s sister, who would return soon to Cannadale from a trip abroad with her parents. The family had approved. Peter himself had approved. And now….

Horrified, he turned from Granville to the whimpering girl who was being helped erect. Cruel fingers had torn the girl’s dress, ripped it from neck to waist and left red claw-marks on white flesh. Jack Granville had done that.

“You know the girl, too, Mr. Langdon?”

Peter shook his head. No. He had never seen her before. She was not Laura.

He stood there, dazed, while the policemen led Jack Granville away. They had no trouble doing that. Granville seemed stupefied, drunkenly bewildered, unaware of what had happened. He went without resisting. And the girl went too, clinging fearfully to the arm of a policeman.

Peter stood there, staring.

TERROR returned with the realization that he had found not Laura, but only more of the horror which was seeping like malignant poison through Cannadale. The picture of Jack Granville and of the bruised, bleeding body of Granville’s screaming victim went with him as he paced sluggishly forward.

Laura… Dear God, where was Laura? Had she too suffered the terrors which that girl must have suffered, in the embrace of a lusting madman? Had she endured even more?

The doorway loomed dark and forbidding before him, in its depths a sound of rainwater spilling noisily from a ledge above. The street was deserted again. Peter slouched forward. And then—someone was walking beside him. A familiar voice from lips that seemed fashioned of stone was saying ever so softly: “Perhaps I can help you find her. Who knows?”

With a gasping intake of breath, Peter whirled.

The granite-gray face that hung in the rain beside him was wet now, and gleamed yellow in the glow of the street lamp. A smile hung on the man’s bloodless mouth as if indeed those lips were molded of some substance other than flesh, and could assume no different expression.

“Yes, perhaps I can help you find her, ” the man murmured.

Peter Langdon stood with feet apart on the sidewalk in water that ran loudly from the depths of the doorway. Swaying, he knew that his own face had turned ghastly white, his eyes were swelling in their sockets. Good God, what manner of man was this? Was the form beneath those black garments a human form or something risen from an unholy grave—something able to come and go as silently as death itself?

He clenched his fists in anticipation of the fiend’s attack. But that granite face was still smiling; a cold hand reached gently to fasten on his upraised arm.

“You are seeking your loved one, I know. Come with me. “

“Damn you!” Peter snarled. “What have you done with her?”

“She is unharmed. The rest you must learn for yourself. “

Peter hung back. Afraid? Terror was the word. But why in God’s name should he be so afraid of this man? He, Peter Langdon, possessed two powerful fists and a body which towered head and shoulders above the puny creature before him!

“I—I won’t go. “

“But I insist. And she insists. Come. “

The hand on Peter’s arm closed slowly, drawing him forward. Clenching, it bit into the drenched sleeve of his coat, was like an iron claw twisting cruelly into flesh that burned with sudden agony. “Come. Surely you know by now that I am strong enough, if need be, to force you!”

Peter moved in a daze, without further protest. He went because he feared not to, and because the undulating drone of the man’s voice numbed him. In the depths of his stupefied brain another voice whispered a warning; but the grip of those compelling fingers did not relax. “Come!” And Peter went.

CHAPTER THREE

The Hunger Plague

HERE was danger. Here where rainwater spilled from rotted timbers overhead and a flight of black stairs snaked upward into gloom, lay the secret of the disease which had claimed so many of Cannadale’s young men and women. Peter knew it. Why then was he allowing himself to be led into the trap? Was it because he knew also that there was no other way of learning the truth?

The fingers had loosened their hold, yet he slowly ascended the stairs as that silent shape before him climbed to the second floor landing. There was a light now, dancing from the flame of a match in the man’s outthrust hand. The light moved to a gas-jet and clung there, stirred by a draft that swept the empty hall. In the glow of it the granite face swung round again; the sunken, horribly alive eyes smiled mockingly.

“Come!”

What was this house? Was it an empty tenement, perhaps, which the monster had transformed into a dark den of iniquity from which he could prowl forth on nightly missions of evil? Everything here was so tomblike, so deathly still!

The scrape of his own shoes rasped like a file against Peter’s nerves. Those other feet ahead of him thumped hollowly along the hall toward yet another doorway. Strange, that they should beat so loudly. The feet of a stone idol, endowed with life, would thud that way….

“Where—are you taking me?”

No answer. One of those granite hands, outstretched, pushed the door open; darkness swelled forth to envelope the fiend’s shrunken body. Groping, Peter followed. The door swung shut behind him. “You will be seated—there. ” The man with the stone face, standing now like a black ghoul in the dark, was pointing to a chair.

Peter slumped down, staring. “You—you’ll bring her to me?” Why in God’s name was he letting those glittering eyes make a puppet of him? Why couldn’t he stand up and seize that withered body in his hands and break it in two? Was it terror alone that made him sit there, gaping—or was it something more sinister?

“Perhaps you wonder who I am, Peter Langdon. ” Stone-faced paced closer, stood now within arm’s reach. “Wait, and you shall know. First—”

Too late Peter saw the hands that stabbed toward him! His effort to lurch erect was thwarted; the iron fingers clamped on his arms, held him. Too late he realized that the chair into which he had so foolishly slumped was no ordinary chair!

It was bolted to the wall, had iron shackles jutting from its arms. And Peter’s own arms were being forced into the shackles, despite his frantic efforts to writhe erect. In ghastly silence he fought with the fiend who had so cunningly trapped him. Fought? It was not that! No man with the strength of an ordinary mortal could hope to break the grip of those granite fingers!

His fists smashed against the hovering face, beat a tattoo against flesh that felt no pain. Sobbing, he sank his teeth into the hunched shoulder that pressed him back, but there was no outcry from the fiend’s lips.

One of the iron shackles had clamped shut. The other did likewise, with a metallic clank like the striking of a clock. Then the monster was on his knees, gripping Peter’s ankles, forcing them into other shackles on the chair-legs despite Peter’s superhuman efforts to kick loose.

Breathing noisily, the man with the stone face stood erect, and was smiling.

“Now I shall bring the girl to you and let you see what has been done to her. It is always better to show a man what can be done; then he is the more willing to believe that the same can be done to him!”

The mocking smile inspired Peter to new efforts, dragged him forward in a mad lunge that brought agony when the shackles whipped him back again. “Damn you! If you’ve harmed Laura—”

“Laura? But she told me her name was Jane. Jane Berkely. Yes, I am sure of it. It was she who told me your name also. “

Jane Berkely? That was the name of Laura’s cousin. How did this man know? Peter stared dully into the glittering eyes that watched him. Jane Berkely? The girl’s face swam in the torment-mist of his brain. Jane’s face, as he had always known it, young and gently attractive. And then suddenly the face changed expression; blurred by a dank mist from the river, it swayed toward him—hungry, distorted by lust.

Jane! It was she then, and not Laura, who had accosted him there on the street, eternities ago! Jane was the girl who had been dragged away in the embrace of those granite arms!

THE truth, knifing home, brought a hoarse cry from Peter’s lips. Good Lord, how had he made such a mistake? How had he been such a fool? Laura, his Laura, was safe!

But she had not answered the phone when Doctor Coleman had called. More than likely, having discovered Jane’s absence, she had gone out into the streets in hysterical search, and had not returned…. Had she too fallen prey to the plague? Was she here—here in this house of shadows—with Jane?

Peter looked wildly into the grey face above him, said hoarsely: “How many girls have you dragged here? Who else is here besides Jane? Tell me!”

“You shall see for yourself. “

The man with the stone face had turned away, was pacing toward a door in the opposite wall while Peter sat stiff, gripping the rungs of the chair. There was only the sound of two men breathing and the leaden thump of the fiend’s slow-moving feet. Where was he going? Whom would he bring back with him?

“Damn you!” Peter stormed. “Let me loose! Take these shackles off!” Abruptly he was silent, because another sound had whispered into the room’s shadows. Against the farther door the man with the granite face was rigid, staring.

Footsteps! Heavy, hurrying footsteps on the stairs and in the corridor!

No expression came into that stone face. No expression could come into it, Peter was certain, unless chiseled there with some instrument capable of carving solid rock. The glittering eyes, though, showed sudden fear. Like phosphorescent beetles they leaped in their sockets as the man took a faltering step backward.

A heavy fist hammered on the corridor door. “Open up in there! Open in the name of the law!”

Stone-face shrank back, seemed for a moment to be trembling with terror. Then his outthrust hand jerked to the other door and pulled it open. The door thudded shut behind him. The echoes of his pounding footsteps were smothered by harsh voices clamoring for admission.

Gone! The fiend was escaping, carrying his secrets and perhaps his prisoners with him! A scream tore from Peter’s throat as he fought to free himself, to give chase. The corridor door was swaying, groaning on its hinges. It crashed inward.

Uniformed policemen stormed into the room.

After that, Peter Langdon was not sure what happened. His voice, bellowing instructions, all but incoherent; his frantic efforts to free himself only made the task more difficult for those who struggled to release him.

Some of the policemen knew him; one told him briefly that Laura Welkin’s Aunt Millicent had rushed wildly into the station, some time ago, to report the disappearance of Jane Berkely— whereupon the police had sent men into the slums in search of her. Those men had seen Stone-face and trailed him….

Peter understood only part of it. Enormous in his brain was the single thought that the man with the stone face was escaping! Then, freed at last from his shackles, he went stumbling over the threshold where the fiend had vanished. Men in uniform went with him.

IT was a house with many rooms and multiple dark corridors where the beat of prowling feet made thunder in a tomblike silence. Many rooms—all of them dark, empty. Of the master of the house there was no slightest trace nor even a clue to say which way he had fled.

“A face like stone?” one of the policemen said to Peter, scowling. “You—sure ?”

In the gleam cast by an advancing searchlight, Peter’s own face was like stone, white and stiff as marble. “He dragged Jane in here. Maybe Laura, too. Now he’s gone—gone—”

“Well, don’t you worry, Mr. Langdon. Every cop in Cannadale has been on this case since the first of these damned disappearances was reported. We’ll get to the bottom of it. “

Mirthless laughter rattled in Peter’s throat. “Yes, you’ll get to the bottom of it—too late! It’s already too late!”

Alone he went away from there, out over that cursed threshold which led to the slum street where the horror had first begun. Uptown a clock was tolling four. Perhaps if he went now to Laura’s house, she would have returned there. If not, he could walk the streets looking for her… looking and hoping until hope died.

The big house was dark when he climbed the steps and rang the bell. The hope within him had already been murdered by too much thinking, by a realization that this new horror was no separate ghastly thing in itself, but merely one link in a chain which had begun weeks ago and might stretch unendingly into a dismal future.

Drenched to the skin he stood waiting to hear a sound of footsteps beyond the door. But there would be no steps…

The door opened in his face!

Peter’s cry of thanksgiving welled on wings of wild joy. “Laura! You’re safe! Oh, my dear!” But he got no answer. The pajama-clad figure stood strangely stiff in the gloom of the doorway; wide eyes stared at him with queer intentness.

“Laura, what’s wrong? What is it?”

“So you’ve come at last, ” she whispered. She drew him inside, impatiently closed the door. “We’re alone now, Peter… ” Her clutching hand was cold. “Come, Peter!” And she led him furtively along the hall, up the big staircase to her own room on the floor above.

The door clicked shut. Peter stood stiff, gazing with troubled eyes at the girl he had come seeking. She stood between him and a lamp glowing there on the dressing-table—stood in filmy flesh-colored pajamas through which the light gleamed like something unreal, revealing every curve of her swaying body.

In Laura Welkin’s eager eyes lurked the same mad lust which had blazed so long in the eyes of Jane Berkely, on that fog-ridden street in the slums!

Stunned, Peter fell away from her, pushed out a trembling hand as she glided toward him. “Laura! What’s come over you?” Terror filled his voice with metallic harshness. This wasn’t— couldn’t be—the Laura he loved! She had always been so shy, so modest!

“I’ve waited, Peter. When Aunt Millicent went to the police I went into the streets to find Jane. I looked everywhere, then came back here and waited for you. I knew you’d come to me. “

She came closer to him, closer, and horror swelled in Peter’s eyes, jangled in the hoarse croak of his voice as he pushed her away.

“You’re insane, Laura! You’re not yourself!”

In her terribly bright eyes blazed an anger such as he had never before seen in them. “You mean you don’t want me?”

Peter staggered to the door, leaned there. Dully, stupidly, he knew what had happened, knew that in walking the streets in search of Jane, Laura had somehow come in contact with the same hideous disease which had transformed Jane into a lusting masochist.

The knowledge seared through him, burned like fire in his veins; then the fire cooled and left him cold, horribly stiff. “Laura, ” he mumbled, “for God’s sake—”

“You’re being silly, Peter. ” Her voice was honey-sweet, alluring.

“But you don’t know what you’re doing! I’ll get a doctor and—”

“No!”

“But you need a doctor! My God, if you’d seen Jane the way I saw her, you’d realize what this cursed disease does to its victims! In a little while you’ll be like that. You’ll torture yourself the way she did, the way Jack Granville did. You’ll want to do that, and you’ll find pleasure in the pain of it! Oh, my dear—”

A strange, wild gleam came into the girl’s eyes. She repeated the word “torture” in a low whisper and looked down at her own swaying body.

“Pain must be so sweet…. ” The words were almost inaudible, like those of a person slowly awakening from deep slumber.

She was moving away from him, turning toward the dressing-table. Her questing hands picked up a comb and discarded it, did the same with a small mirror. Her fingers closed over a bone-handled nail file, long and sharp, and she smiled.

HORRIFIED, Peter lurched toward her, but not in time to prevent her from pressing the sharp point of the file into the bared flesh of her arm. The strange wild gleam in her eyes had blazed to madness. She dragged the file down her arm, tearing flesh.

“Stop it!” Peter bellowed. “My God, stop!”

“But I like it, Peter. Here. ” She was holding the infernal thing toward him, its sharp point dripping blood onto the carpet. “Here, take it. ” Her hands slid upward to her shoulders, baring white skin.

Peter’s fist sent the file spinning across the room. “You’re coming with me, ” he said hoarsely. “You need a doctor and it isn’t safe to leave you here while I go for one. “

She stared at him. Snarling, she retreated from his outthrust hands and stood with her slippered feet wide apart on the carpet, her breasts heaving, her face a livid mask in which every muscle twitched. Peter lurched to a stop,

frightened by the menace of her gaze. Merciful God, what had happened to the girl he loved? What could he do to drag her back from the hell into which she had wandered?

“Laura, listen to me. ” His voice was a wail. “Please listen. You’re ill. You’re out of your mind. I’ll get a doctor and—”

“A doctor!” Her shrill laugh froze the blood in his veins.

“You’re mad!”

The word “mad” dragged that volcano of hell-fire to the surface in all its stark fury. The rage of the girl before him swelled to scarlet hate. She hurled herself straight at him, both hands reaching to gouge his face. And there was only one answer, no other explanation for the strange, fearsome expression of ecstasy that filled her face!

She attacked him again and again, forcing him to hurl her back lest his own eyes be torn out by her raking fingers. She screamed curses, spat at him, shrieked at him to strike her if he dared.

If he dared! There was no other way, much as he loved her. Flattening himself against the wall, he clenched his right hand into a fist and drove it in a short, hard jab to her jaw. She went down, unconscious.

Dazed, Peter went over the threshold, went groping and stumbling downstairs and out of the house. The terror that rode his wretched body was a leering, mocking monster that hammered at his sanity. Like an animated corpse, half dead and half alive, he trudged through the rain, not realizing in his madness that he had left behind him a girl who needed help.

WHAT time it was when he reached home he had no idea, nor did he speak more than a few incoherent words to Bernice Marnell, who was aroused by the noise of his stumbling feet in the hall and came downstairs to help him.

Mumbling to her that he wanted to be left alone, he went to his own room and sprawled there on the bed. But the door opened again Bernice was at his side, bending above him.

“Peter, what’s wrong? Please tell me. “

Dully he stared into the lovely dark eyes which were now so full of concern for him. Why should he not tell her what had happened? Surely it would do no harm—and he had to tell someone or go mad.

When he had finished, her warm hands caressed his fevered face and she was sobbing softly with pity for him. “Oh my dear, I’m so sorry. But Laura must have been out of her mind. She must have been. “

“You’re—good to me, ” Peter muttered.

She made hot black coffee and he sipped it, felt dully grateful for her attentiveness as she sat there on the bed and talked to him. When she left the room, he hunched himself on one elbow and watched her until she clicked the light switch. God was cruel. A god of mercy would never have handicapped such a beautiful woman with the curse of a club foot. Never….

He slept because the devouring terrors of the night had fed on his strength. In sleep the triumphantly terrible eyes of the stone-faced man watched over him; he relived those ghastly hours of torment when Doctor Arnold Coleman had hauled him from the murk of a gutter in Cannadale’s slums. Strange that the police, searching that huge tenement house, had found no trace of Stone-face or of Laura’s cousin Jane. Strange…

In sleep the hostile eyes of Aunt Millicent came to take the place of those other eyes and stared coldly out of wrinkled flesh-pits. “You’re not Laura’s husband yet, Peter Langdon! If I have my way you never will be!” She had said that once, and Peter had never forgotten….

Sunlight was yellow on his face when he awoke. The door was open and Coleman stood there, quietly staring at him. Coleman, who worked at the Cannadale Hospital among crippled unfortunates who looked upon him as some kind of god.

The man paced forward, seated himself with professional calm. “You’re not doing so well, Langdon, eh? Bernice called me, told me to come and look you over. “

He went through the usual routine, pulse, temperature, questions to which Peter mumbled half-way answers. “You need sleep, plenty of it. ” Stifling Peter’s protests, he produced pills, ground two of them into a glass of water and made Peter drink.

After that, Peter slept again. When consciousness returned, the room was dark and a clock downstairs was chiming eleven.

Peter was hungry. It was a strange, savage hunger. When he lit the light and looked at himself in a mirror, his face startled him; the eyes in it were bright as blobs of wet pitch, the cheeks gaunt and tight. Something throbbed in his skull, pounded there with the rhythmic swinging beat of a clock’s pendulum. He was hungry… but not for food.

Something was frightfully wrong. Something inside him. He had slept all day after gulping Coleman’s pills, and now it was night again, and there were important things to be done. But first— first he must find Laura. Nothing else mattered.

He tugged on his clothes, walked crookedly into the hall and clung to the banister on his way down the big stair case. Behind him a door creaked open. The voice of Bernice Marnell came sharply, shrilly after him, jerking him to a halt.

“Peter!” Something in that wailing enunciation of his name struck a responsive chord within him. “Peter, where are you going?” He turned, stood at the foot of the stairs and watched her as he descended.

“Peter!” She was close to him now, panting from her rush down the stairs. “You’re not going out? You mustn’t!”

Suddenly conscious of her exquisite loveliness, he thrust his arms toward her, stepped jerkily forward. Then he looked down at the club foot and stiffened.

“You’re not Laura, ” he mumbled. “I thought for a minute—”

Turning, he went staggering down the hall and jerked open the front door. And the wail of his name, flung in strange crescendo from Bernice Marnell’s lips, did not stop him. He got his car out of the garage and drove into the night.

CHAPTER FOUR

Creatures Debauched

HE DROVE through the slums, through that street where Jane Berkely had been dragged to an unknown doom and where Jack Granville had been transformed into a prowling attacker of women. That same street. Was there, perhaps, some hellish loadstone hidden there to attract those who, like him, had fallen prey to the curse?

At Laura’s home, Aunt Millicent opened the door to his insistent ringing. She gaped at him, scowled, peered closer and shrank from him in sudden fear.

“What do you want?”

“I’ve come for Laura, ” he muttered, and repeated the words with an unlovely leer twisting his mouth. “For Laura. “

“She is in bed. Go away from here!”

He flung the woman aside, sent her reeling with a single savage sweep of his arm. Upstairs, the door of Laura’s room was locked and he stood before it, cursing.

Locked! So Aunt Millicent had found out, had she, that Laura had become enslaved to the disease? Aunt Millicent had locked the girl in her room?

Downstairs someone was frantically using the dial telephone—Aunt Millicent, terrified, calling the police. The police! What imbeciles they had been for the past several weeks, blundering like blind men in their search for Cannadale’s evil secret! Now they would come here to arrest Peter Langdon, just as they had seized Jack Granville.

Well, they would come too late!

With renewed fury he hurled himself at the door, hammered it savagely with clenched fists before discovering the key in the lock. The door made thunder against the wall as he flung it open. Laura stood facing him, stark terror in her frozen face.

“Peter!”

“You’re coming with me, ” he croaked. “My car is outside and we’re going to the hunting camp on Lost Lake, where you’ll be safe. Come on, just as you are. “

Just as she was? Evidently she had been dragged from bed by the clamor of his struggle with Aunt Millicent. She wore the same filmy pajamas in which he had last seen her.

“But I can’t, Peter, ” she faltered. “We mustn’t. “

He knew then that the effects of her madness had worn off, while with him the disease was raging unchecked. “I’m taking you to Lost Lake!” he snarled.

Her answer came in a quavering, terror-laden voice that was barely audible. “Peter, what’s wrong with you? Don’t you—love me?”

The question was too difficult. He had no time for it now. Love her? No, this wasn’t love; it was something evil, something sinister which had seized him during the night.

He lurched forward. When she fell away from him, struck at his out-flung arms and screamed at him to stop, he snarled curses and gathered her off the floor, strode with her to the door and carried her, kicking and shrieking and pleading, down the staircase.

Aunt Millicent blocked his path to the door. “Stop, Peter Langdon! You don’t know what you’re doing!” And again, with a bull-whip slash of one arm, he sent the old woman reeling.

Outside he threw Laura into the car, clambered over her and jammed his own big body behind the wheel. A moment later, while the machine careened wildly along one of Cannadale’s main streets, he leered hungrily into Laura’s bloodless face and saw that she had fainted.

“We’re going to the hunting camp on Lost Lake, ” he told her. And he was a madman mumbling words which even to himself meant nothing. “To Lost Lake…. “

FROM Cannadale, the road which wound through the woods to the mile long pit of darkness known as Lost Lake wound also past the Cannadale Hospital—that huge grey hulk, once the isolated estate of some wealthy citizen, inhabited now by stricken men and women who hoped some day to find relief there from the torments of twisted limbs and shattered bodies. Peter Langdon peered at the place as he drove past. A shudder shook him; for an instant the mad lust was driven from his soul by memories of the times he had visited within those dark walls. Coleman had taken him through the place often, just as Coleman had taken Bernice Marnell and others.

Men and women entered those great gates with desperation and dead hope in their hearts. When all other cures had been taken in vain, the sufferers came here to undergo the most dreaded treatment of all—that of utter isolation which in many cases continued until death.

“Peter—”

He peered into the face that hung close to his shoulder, and the beast within him was born again. “I’m taking you to Lost Lake!”

The Cannadale Hospital was gulped behind in the night’s starless gloom. The machine careened on its way. At a snail’s pace it crawled along the rutted road that snaked through deep woods to the lake shore, where a rough shack built of logs reared its bulk in darkness. No one would come here to intrude. No one would ever know what happened here.

Peter clambered out of the car, dragged Laura with him and smothered her frantic efforts to resist. The beast within him was screaming; the sounds fuming from his curled lips were animal sounds that filled Laura’s wide eyes with helpless dread.

“Peter, what are you doing? Think of what it means. Think of the future!”

He dragged the door shut, flung her onto the couch that stood near the wall. While he bent above the lamp the girl made a mad, desperate attempt to hurl herself at the door, only to be slammed back again brutally by Peter’s grinding fist.

He found rope, bound that sobbing, wretched shape so severely into a chair that the rope cut raw welts in the heaving flesh of her shoulders.

“Now you’re mine, ” he muttered, “and we’re alone here. “

“Peter, you’re mad!”

“Mad, am I?” He stood glaring at her, then stepped away, scowling, and continued to stare while the word rang in his twisted brain. Mad? Somehow a realization of what he was about to do wormed its fevered way into him and stuck there.

Mad? Of course he was mad! This whole thing was hellishly, awfully wrong. It meant the end of everything, of their love for each other, their plans for the future. Why then was he creeping toward her, his mind fastened on the one consuming thought of seizing her? What devilish power was driving him?

“I can’t help myself, Laura, ” he muttered brokenly. “God forgive me, / can’t help myself!”

And suddenly he was staring not at the cringing, sobbing girl before him but at something in the gloom beyond!

It came gliding out of darkness, through the ochre pool of light cast by the lamp. A face. A face that was a mask of shadows with eyes that gleamed like the orbs of a leaping cat. The man with the stone face!

Peter made no outcry. Breath jammed in his throat and he took a slow, fearful step backward as the whole of that sinister shape materialized

before him. It advanced with ghastly lack of haste, seemed to glide rather that walk. Straight past the chair where Laura was bound the monster moved—straight toward Peter’s stiff body.

“For you, Peter Langdon—and for her—this is the end. ” The granite lips were intoning that and the words were low, vibrant, clearly audible through the gasping cry of terror that choked from Laura’s throat.

“Be careful, Peter! He’ll hurt you!”

“No, I shall not hurt him more than is necessary. I have come to take you both into slavery…. “

And then Peter was fighting. Had he been saner he might have seized some nearby object and used it for a weapon. The lamp, for instance, or one of the heavy irons from the fireplace, or a rusty, unloaded gun from the wall. But terror destroyed his reason. He lunged forward to fight with bare hands, knowing all too well that those hands had already proved themselves hopelessly impotent. He fought as a jungle beast might have battled for its mate against some prowling marauder who sought to drag her into the jungle’s fastness. The Vesuvius of his fear had erupted, lifting a strange kind of mad courage from hidden depths within him.

He fought snarling—but the granite hands were at his throat and rigid arms forced brim back to the wall and held him there. “You are foolish, ” the stone-faced man said calmly, “to struggle. If you anger me I shall kill you. “

The fingers burrowed like devouring maggots in the agonized flesh of his throat. Tearing at them he could not dislodge them. The face before him was smiling; the room was filled with high brittle screams that shrilled from the girl who was powerless to come to his assistance.

Then he was on his knees, writhing, while the face leered above him. And one of the granite hands, releasing its hold, swept into the fiend’s clothing… stabbed forward again to crush a wet, cold cloth over Peter’s mouth. Chloroform….

“I shall take you with me into slavery, ” the man said. “Both of you. “

PETER awoke and lay staring, his sprawled body cold and stiff from having lain too long on a stone floor. In his throbbing head sickness undulated like whirlpools in tide-water. Only vaguely was he sure of the fact that both he and Laura had been dragged to new surroundings—to some chill stone cellar where twisted shapes walked in horror.

Those shapes were men, moving like bent and broken monsters in a nightmare. They peered out from behind the bars of a grille, that separated them from the rest of the room, to where beyond them loomed a platform where the nude body of a woman stood for them to feast their eyes upon.

Men? That word was mockery. These uncouth creatures had been men; now they were groveling slaves of the stone-faced, cowered fiend who stood watching them.

“Study her well, ” Stone-face was saying calmly. “She is by far the most beautiful woman who has yet been offered for your pleasure. No paltry price will purchase this one. Look at her and be prepared to bid high!” He signaled a girl who stood at his side. The girl came forward to the grille with a key in her hand. She inserted the key in a padlock and swung the door of the cage open. The drooling, gibbering forms shuffled out.

Something about those mumbling, slobbering creatures of darkness was familiar. More curious than concerned—for full consciousness had not yet penetrated the murk in his mind—Peter scowlingly sought to orient himself.

Where had he seen such men before? In some freak-show, perhaps, where human deformities were displayed for a price? Or had he encountered them on one of his frequent tours through the Cannadale Hospital?

The hospital! That was it. These pitiful creatures were some of Arnold Coleman’s patients. This room—this stone vault where the light of day surely never intruded—must be some sunken chamber beneath the huge hospital itself.

Eyes wide with sudden understanding, Peter strained forward. Stone-face turned to peer at him. Then the hooded figure raised the whip Peter now saw in his hand, pointed with it at Peter. “There are women in our company who will bid high for you, Peter Langdon, after your loved one has been properly disposed of. Be not hasty. ” He turned then, raised his whip and lashed the nude, drooping form of the girl beside him. The girl flinched and straightened—but she gave no sign that she felt pain—indeed, she actually smiled!

Peter snarled, jerked savagely toward the girl who stood there less than a dozen strides distant. But that short distance might as well have been blocked by an insurmountable wall. Clanking chains jerked Peter’s big body to the floor again.

Gasping, he peered down, shuddered at the sight of linked serpents of steel that encircled his legs.

There on the dais a long line of deformed men, some old, some not so old, filed in slow procession past the rigid body of Laura Welkin… each stopping to peer avidly into the girl’s unmoving face, each reaching out with eager hands to paw and caress her.

Deformed men? Peter’s horrified eyes saw more! Those deformities were not entirely the product of a cruel fate; not entirely were they the result of hereditary disfigurement or the indelible leftovers of devouring illnesses. Some of those hideous distortions were self-inflicted.

These pitiful creatures had suffered— perhaps were still suffering—from the same evil malady which had transformed Jane Berkely and Jack Granville and other victims into masochistic self-torturers. And those twisted hands were reaching for Laura’s undraped body…

“Stop it!” Peter yelled hoarsely. “Stop it, I say!”

They paid him no attention. Here before their hungry eyes stood a woman. They themselves were unlovely creatures who, fearing the scorn of society, had entered this huge den of despair from which few ever departed. They were men to whom the love of normal women had been denied, men who because of their own fearsome self-mutilation and the depredations of a dark fate, would never find mates.

Now they could feast their eyes upon a woman even more lovely than perhaps they had dared yearn for. They could stare at her, touch her cringing body. And eventually one of them—if Peter had understood aright the hideous words of their stone-faced leader—would own that body, to do with it as he wished.

But why was not Laura screaming for mercy? Why, instead of striving hysterically to escape, was she standing there and allowing those outthrust hands to caress her? She stood motionless, staring with eyes that seemed as hungry, as mad as those which so avidly drank in the sight of her!

A flash of memory seethed through Peter’s brain, bringing the vision of that other time when Laura had been transformed into a woman of dark desire. She had wanted him then, just as he later had wanted her.

This time it was not Peter Langdon she wanted, but those deformed creatures who were examining her as prospective buyers might inspect some valuable object of merchandise to be auctioned off to the highest bidder

THE thought maddened Peter. “Laura, don’t!” he screamed. “Please don’t!”

Could that walling, childish voice be his own? Was this nightmare real, or had his recent battle with the fiend of the granite features twisted his mind and made him as mad as some of the unlovely creatures who seemed to inhabit the chamber he was in? The chains that held him were real enough; he knew that! And the rest was no nightmare either. Even now those twisted horrible figures had fallen away from the platform and were crowding toward Stone-face. Whispering like eager children, leering at one another and joking among themselves, they jerked toward him who was so obviously their king.

“She is worth money, this woman, ” Stone-face was telling them. “Let the bidding begin at a thousand dollars. You are not paupers, any of you, Otherwise you would not be here where men pay handsomely for the treatment they receive. Begin at a thousand. I give you the usual guarantee that the girl will at all times be attentive to the man who becomes her master. “

Raging at his chains, Peter heaved forward again and was again wrenched back in agony. His voice rose in lurid shrieks, incoherent. The twisted creatures turned to leer at him, and some laughed, and Stone-face said darkly: “Be quiet! Soon it will be your time and you, like her, will beg to be sold!”

“You can’t do this thing!” Peter bellowed.

“Be still or I shall feed you the drug now, as it was fed to her while you lay unconscious. “

They paid him no further attention, despite his wild bellowing. The auction had begun. There on a level above that sea of malshaped bodies, Stone-face was intoning words; men crowded closer, some limping, some creeping, to shout their offers. A thousand dollars? The price had leaped skyward already!

“I say three thousand!” Peter heard one man scream. “She is worth it!”

Dear God, what ghastly mockery was this? A fiend with stone features stood before his audience of masochistic beasts and called upon them to bid for an undraped girl who eagerly watched what was going on. What devilish drug had been fed to her, and to other young men and women of Cannadale who surely had preceded her?

For what unholy purpose were those gleaming instruments of torture—horror tools of every conceivable size and shape—piled there upon a long, low table at the end of the platform?

There was an answer somewhere. Despite the madness that sent him screaming against his chains, Peter had already fathomed the biggest part of it. This fiend with features of stone had lived among the sex-starved unfortunates here in the hospital. Knowing their desires, he had supplied them with drugs, had fed them some strange stimulant which, in addition to being an aphrodisiac, had filled the souls of its users with masochistic madness.

And then, Stone-face had contrived to find mates for them—mates who, while under the influence of the same evil drug, would be willing, even eager, to be sold into slavery. Here in this chamber of horrors which certainly lay somewhere in the vast cellar of the hospital itself, Stone-face had sold those drugged young men and women to the highest bidders….

“For a woman so beautiful as this one, I offer five thousand dollars! Give her to me!” The shrill outcry stabbed through Peter’s frenzy, jerked his gaze to the man who had uttered it. Surely no one would raise that bid!

The room was silent. On the platform Stone-face waited for the bidder to come forward; the others made a lane for him. Laura, untroubled by the gaze of lustful eyes, came to the edge of the platform and stood smiling. Smiling!

FIVE thousand dollars—and Stone-face was nodding; the deal was closed. Aghast, Peter stared at the creature who had closed it, while on hands and knees, one withered leg dragging, the man crawled laboriously to the dais.

How in the name of God could any woman look with eagerness upon a creature so repulsive? Years of physical torment, some of it surely self-inflicted, had made an agony-mask of the face that twitched forward now with anticipation. Ugly, bestial….

“No, no, ” Peter mumbled. “Laura, you mustn’t!… “

If she heard his plaintive wail she was indifferent to it. The creature was crawling forward to claim his due. Men were muttering again, some in anger at being outbid, some whining their disappointment. Stone-face smiled the same frozen smile.

Behind Peter a low voice said softly:

“Are you thinking of her future, Peter, or of your own?”

So soft, that voice! So gentle! Peter jerked around, stiffened with twitching muscles when his gaze fell upon the foot that had reached out of darkness to touch his shoulder. A club foot! Slowly he stared upward into the woman’s face.

“Bernice!” The name came convulsively. “Bernice Marnell. Are you—part of this?”

“A very important part, Peter. ” The woman’s dark eyes, pools of desire, studied him passionately. Framed there in the shadows she was a creature of the night itself, too beautiful, too sensually lovely to be real.

“Together with Carl Maignon, ” she said, “who stands there with his face of stone, I am the most important part of everything you see here. It was I who told Carl Maignon to bring you here. “

Was it hypnotism that kept Peter’s terrified gaze fastened on that hovering face when every fiber of his being shrieked at him to turn and see what might be happening to the girl he loved? Whatever the strange power that lived in those eyes, it held him, dragged him to his knees. When he would have struggled erect, the woman pushed him down again and murmured: “Not yet. First, listen. “

In all that vast room there seemed to exist no sound other than the low vibration of her voice. Perhaps there was no other sound; perhaps in truth those twisted denizens of darkness and the granite-faced creature on the platform were silently awaiting the woman’s commands. Peter was not sure…

“IN THE beginning, ” Bernice declared, “Carl Maignon was a scientist who came here for treatment after chemicals had eaten into his face and hands and legs, solidifying the flesh to granite hardness, destroying the facial muscles and endowing that small body with terrific strength. While here among these men and women who longed for mates, he continued his experiments in secret, in this unused part of the cellars which even Doctor Coleman and others of the hospital staff know nothing about. “

She smiled. “Yes, ” she murmured, “Coleman and the others would delight in finding this secret rendezvous of ours! Often have they sought to discover how, and why, their patients become so strangely disfigured and so lustful!

“But here Maignon worked, perfecting a drug capable of arousing the passion of men and women to its fever pitch. Perhaps he was also slightly mad, for on one of my visits to the hospital he met me in a secluded part of the grounds and whispered his secret to me, and told me of its possibilities. And because I am less noble than you think me, Peter, I agreed to help him, for I have been a lonely woman and a cripple, and the thought of wealth and love was not unpleasant. “

Had she memorized those words? Had she waited days, weeks, for this opportunity to utter them? Like a recital of some weird ritual they fell against Peter’s brain, numbing him.

“From the very beginning I have loved and wanted you, Peter. Therefore I made certain that this other woman who had won your love—this Laura of yours—” her voice was suddenly bitter— “received her share of Maignon’s drug, so that she might, before being brought here into slavery, disfigured herself physically and come to you as a shameless wanton whom you would despise and disown.

“But my plans went along mistaken paths. I was forced to drug you, hoping that in your desire you would turn to me, who lived under the same roof with you. Again something went wrong, for you went into the night seeking her, and left me alone with my rage. Now—”

The others were awaiting this woman’s commands! In all that huge chamber there was no sound except the whisper of men breathing, the sledge-hammer thundering of Peter’s own heart. He turned his head slowly to stare at Laura, and she was there upon the platform, staring impatiently at the woman whose low voice had begun to drone again.

“For you, Peter Langdon, your Laura exists no more, and you will do well to forget her. In a moment you must decide your own fate, whether to be drugged and sold into slavery, as she was sold, or to accept the other terms which I shall offer you. Come and see what awaits you!”

Slender hands were fumbling at Peter’s ankles, thrusting a key into the padlock that secured his chains. He looked wildly around. Was he to be released? Was Bernice mad enough to believe that her hold over him was complete and that he would follow her like a dog who no longer needed a leash?

He tensed himself, drew breath into his laboring lungs as he staggered erect. The chains lay at his feet.

“Come!” the woman commanded. And then with sinking heart Peter realized that Carl Maignon had descended from the platform and was standing beside him, one gaunt hand reaching to fasten on his shoulder.

The feeble shred of common sense that remained to him warned him to go quietly, lest those stone fingers again imbed themselves in his throat. He was stronger now, but that strength would be needed when—and if—an opportunity for escape presented itself.

He glanced at Laura. Sprawled naked on the platform, she returned his gaze without a sign of recognition. Drugged….

Slowly then, Peter allowed himself to be led from the room, along a gaslit corridor that wound into a distant part of the cellar. The journey consumed perhaps three minutes, if time meant anything in this underworld of gloom. At its end the woman drew Peter to a halt, before a closed door where, with vague lines of anticipation playing about her carmine mouth, she produced keys.

“Prepare yourself, ” she said softly. “In this world of mine there are sights worth the seeing!”

The door swung open.

CHAPTER FIVE

Face of Stone

IT WAS a smaller chamber than the one Peter had come from. Being smaller it was more crowded, for the creatures who inhabited it were many. But these twisted shapes were women, not men!

Women! Young and old, deformed and hideous and pitiful! Like animals in a monstrous cage they turned with one accord as the door creaked open.

Peter stood rigid in the doorway, face frozen with the horror of what he looked at.

“God!” he whispered.

Seeing him there they crowded forward, snarling and fighting among themselves in their eagerness to reach him. One old hag, naked and ponderous, slithered like a fat serpent, head upraised, eyes gleaming with desire. Another, young and less hideous, stretched twisted stumps of arms toward him and made animal sounds through shapeless lips. These creatures, too, had been supplied with Carl Maignon’s infernal drug! They, too, had been stimulated and aroused to a frenzy of self-torture by its frightful potency!

“You see” Bernice Marnell murmured, “how they would welcome the chance to possess you, especially if Maignon’s brew made you eager to be possessed?”

Peter shuddered back, dragged the door shut and turned on stiff legs, his body trembling. “God!” he whispered again, and Bernice was smiling at his terror.

“Now look at me, Peter Langdon, ” she commanded “They want you and so do I, for I have loved you always. Take me, and with your money and our undying love for each other we can go away from this place, away from Cannadale, and live together in happiness. You have your choice. Take me and swear to make me your wife, or else be drugged and carried back to the auction room where these lovely creatures will bid for your permanent adoration. “

Her hands were on Peter’s arms, drawing him closer. “I could have you the other way, my beloved. Remember that. I could drug you and make of you a passionate slave who would forever worship at my command. But I want you for my husband, with legal bonds to chain us. Later, perhaps, we may both make use of Maignon’s drug—for our own amusement. “

The words were storm waves crashing thunderously against the jagged rocks of Peter’s brain. He heard them without listening, while before his bulging eyes loomed a vision of what lay beyond the door which Carl Maignon was calmly relocking.

“Why do you hesitate, Peter?” The voice was softer now and darkly sensual. “Am I not lovelier than they? Am I not lovelier even than the woman you once hoped to wed? Look at me. “

He stared—and she was naked before him as her dark garments, released by her own swift-moving hands, whispered to the floor. Her eyes, staring at him, inviting him to come closer, were like lidless orbs in the swaying head of a serpent, their gaze focused unblinkingly on his own.

“Look at me, Peter. Am I not worthy of you?”

Peter, shaking his head, mumbled brokenly: “I love Laura. Laura—not you!” He was a drowning man clutching at one last bit of driftwood which eluded him in the storm-waters of his own dark terror. He could not resist this woman. Merciful God, why was that? Had he already been drugged?

A jerky step took him toward her outthrust arms, while Bernice Marnell smiled a smile of triumph. In another moment the man she wanted—wanted either for love or for his money— would be crushing her against him, exquisitely hurting her in the madness of his own desire. “Come, Peter—!”

She had forgotten Carl Maignon!

Behind her, Maignon stared with the ravening hunger of a starved beast. But her attention was centered unswervingly upon the man she wanted, and she did not turn.

“So, ” Maignon snarled, “you would give to him what you have never given me!”

The girl swung with a gasping cry, realized her peril too late and flung herself sideways to avoid his mad rush. Hands hard as stone stabbed from the fiend’s withered body, caught her and spun her savagely into his corded arms.

AFTERWARD, Peter was never sure why he went to the woman’s assistance when he might have used those precious moments in escaping, in getting Laura Welkin out of the horror-chamber at the end of the passage. Perhaps the driving force behind his rush was man’s natural instinct to protect woman; perhaps the worms of his passion were still crawling.

Yet despite his madness he knew better than to strike at that granite face with his hands! Head down, he crashed with pile-driver force into Maignon’s stomach. The man staggered back, bent double with a grunt of agony. Bernice Marnell whirled free of those grasping hands and fled like a pale shadow down the corridor. Like a jungle beast thwarted in the act of feeding, Maignon lunged, snarling, to destroy the man who had thwarted him.

Destroy? Not now! Not ever! From Bernice Marnell’s own lips Peter had heard the secret of the man’s abnormal strength! Chemicals had solidified his face and hands and legs to granite hardness. But the rest of that withered body…

Peter met the headlong charge with a clenched fist that ground into the pit of Maignon’s stomach. Again and again the fist crashed into flesh that could be hurt, while Maignon sought in vain, hysterically, to seize those flailing arms in granite fingers which could kill if they found a hold.

With the cold-blooded deliberation of a ring veteran, Peter moved on gliding feet, leaped forward, back, forward again, ever beyond reach of the groping death-hands. Then his own hands caught that twisting body and raised it, hurled it.

With a grinding thud Maignon crashed against the wall and fell—and lay silent, his stone face red with gathering blood.

Peter turned, went stumbling down the corridor. Bernice Marnell had gone this way before him, but now he mumbled the name of another woman—the girl who had been sold into the arms of a deformed monstrosity.

Wide-eyed, he flung open the chamber door—and stopped.

Little had changed in that room of evil since he had been led from it. There on the platform Laura Welkin still lay undraped, sprawled like a creature exhausted by her own passions. Twisted men turned to stare at the door, as if aroused from lethargy by the sound of the door’s opening.

Standing rigid at the edge of the dais was Bernice Marnell, her dark beauty concealed now beneath a loose-wrapped shawl, as if perhaps she feared to expose herself to the creatures before her lest their lust send them lurching forward.

“You are too late, Peter Langdon!” she cried bitterly. But Peter strode forward.

Not realizing the meaning of those shrill words, Peter continued to lurch forward, his eyes fastened unswervingly on the girl he loved. Then he stopped.

What had Bernice shrieked at him? Dear God, no! “You’re lying!” he bellowed. “You’re not telling the truth!”

“You are too late!”

Horror came at Peter in a gelid wave. His eyes misted; he saw the sprawled shape on the dais through a red mist of madness. When he looked again into the triumphant face of Bernice Marnell, his madness became red rage.

“You let them do it! If it’s true I’ll kill you!”

Straight toward the platform he strode, hurling aside the twisted things that got in his way. Into Bernice Marnell’s staring eyes came terror that stiffened the limbs of her half-draped body and drew a lurid shriek from her lips when she saw that Peter would not, could not, be stopped.

She whirled, displayed amazing strength in raising the nude body of Laura Welkin in her arms. Swaying on the platform’s rim, she held the limp shape aloft, poised it as one might hold a dead carcass before hurling it into a den of wild beasts.

“Stop, Peter! If you come nearer, I’ll throw this girl to the mob! Then not even madness will give you strength enough to save her!”

Bernice Marnell staggered under the weight of the body she held aloft. “You fool!” she shrieked. “You insane idiot! Think of what you are doing!”

The words had no effect. Growling his rage, Peter strode like a lurching tank leaving destruction in his wake.

And then, still shrieking, the terrified woman on the dais jerked forward, hurled Laura Welkin into space. Hurled her not into the arms of the twisted ones, but straight at Peter to stop him!

He caught the full weight of that flung body against his chest, staggered to his knees. But he was erect again, ploughing forward! The limp body of Laura Welkin was clasped in his arms, was being shifted now to one heaving shoulder as he raged to the platform steps.

Amazed at his strength, Bernice Marnell leaped backward too late to avoid his clutching fingers. The fingers caught her throat. Slowly, terribly, Peter dragged the woman toward him, forced her to her knees and strangled her. The frenzied clawing of her hands did not stop him. The gurgling cries in her throat did not penetrate his madness.

Turning, he dragged that writhing shape to the edge of the dais and flung it to the twisted things below. “Take her!” he snarled. “Take her and be damned to you!”

Then, knowing nothing of what he was doing except that he was obeying the commands of his own frenzied mind, he put both arms around the thighs of the woman who hung limply over his shoulder, and, still snarling, strode across the platform, leaving behind him a pack of slavering things that were too well occupied to think of pursuing him.

A door loomed before him. A flight of steps led upward through the darkness, and with the same heavy stride which had carried him, like an automaton fashioned of insensate iron, through the horror chamber which lay behind, Peter climbed into gloom. Traversing dark corridors he ascended other stairways and found himself at last in open air.

LATER he sat in Laura’s own bedroom while Coleman, of the hospital staff, straightened from an examination of the girl and said quietly: “She will be all right. Whatever drug was given her, it has lost most of its grip and will have no permanent effect. You need sleep, Langdon. It’s been hours since you had any. “

Hours? Peter did not know. Vaguely he recalled that he had brought Laura here and used the telephone to call Coleman and the police. The police had gone to that gray-walled institution outside the city. They had found Carl Maignon in the gloom of an underground corridor, dead. They had found Cannadale’s missing young men and women imprisoned in other parts of that vast cellar. And they had found Bernice Marnell, the clubfooted woman, wandering in a dark, wretched world of madness. Yet she had not been too mad to confess.

Strange confession! Cursing those who dragged the words out of her, she had told triumphantly how she herself, well known and well liked in Cannadale, had ingeniously fed Carl Maignon’s drug to desirable victims—how Maignon had haunted the trail of each new victim, awaiting an opportunity to provide his flock with more slaves.

But Maignon was dead now, and the clubfooted woman would perhaps soon join him, or go instead to some institution where escape would be impossible. There was only Laura, who with the exit of Doctor Coleman had turned now to stare into Peter’s watching eyes.

Peter groped slowly toward her. “Back there, ” he mumbled, “Bernice Marnell said—”

“Yes, Peter?”

“She said I was too late. ” He held her close to him, savagely, fearing the words that might come in answer. “She said you had already given yourself to some of those creatures. Laura-did you?”

“I don’t remember, Peter. I don’t— know. “

His own face paled. For an eternity he looked into the imploring eyes that were so near his own, and then his big body ceased trembling. “Bernice was lying, ” he said, his voice strongly low, vibrant. “Nothing happened to you. Nothing! Do you understand?”

She nodded slowly, clung to him with cold hands that trembled. “Nothing—happened to me, Peter. “

Sunlight, weaving a golden pattern over her face, swept aside the shadows that hovered there and seemed somehow to make truth of Laura’s whispered words—and held a golden promise for the future.

THE END

Table of Contents

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE