Dr. Creepen's Dungeon - S5 Ep287: Episode 287: Living Dead Horror

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Today’s terrifying tale of terror is all six chapters of the classic ‘Chains of the Living Dead’, an old-school work by the wonderful Arthur Leo Zagat, freely available in the public domain and read here under the conditions of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1304441h.html

Hey Ontario, come on down to BetMGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show. Only at BetMGM. Access to the Price is right fortune pick is only available at BetMGM Casino. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you,

please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Welcome to Dr. Creepin's dungeon. The living dead terrify us because they blur the most sacred boundary we know. The line between life and death. They embody the horror of what happens when nature's rule stop working, when the familiar becomes grotesque. A corpse that moves, hungers, and remembers fragments of its past

forces us to confront our deepest fear. A death might not bring us peace or finality. but endless decay and instinct without soul. In the living dead we see not only our own mortality, but the nightmare of losing what makes us human, as we shall see in tonight's feature-length story. Now, as ever before we begin, a word of caution. Tonight's tale may contain strong language

as well as descriptions of violence and horrific imagery. That sounds like your kind of thing. Then let's begin. What uncanny devil's crew roamed the bleak slopes of superstitious. and mountain, clanking heavy chains. Was it madness that sent Laura Standish racing through the haunted night, begging for aid which no living man dared give her? Chains of the living dead by Arthur Leo Ziggott.

Chapter 1. Home Invasion Laura Standish blurted out her husband's name before she was fully awake. Frank! But there was no answer. even before she realized just what it was that had awakened her, a chill little quiver of dread brushed her spine. The fire on the hearth, before which she'd fallen asleep, was low, and there was no other light in the huge, dark-ceilinged parlour.

Good Lord, it was already night, and Frank wasn't back yet. It was to have been gone only an hour, ample time to go down the hill to the general store in the village and get some food for supper. She'd been too tired after their long trip from the city to go with him, and he'd seemed worried about leaving her alone here. Hmm, something must have. A sound at the door brought Laura startled to her feet.

He was here at last. Returning circulation needled her cramped legs so that she couldn't move. Well, Frank had a key, but... The rasp of flesh against wood, out there in the gloomy foyer, was somehow furtive. He beat out from the glowing logs in the fireplace, yet Laura shivered with queasy cold. Suddenly she knew it was the stealthiness of that groping hand, the menace implicit in its quietness that had awakened her, and suddenly she knew also that she was afraid.

Someone was trying to get in, and it wasn't frank. For a moment panic swept over her, and she cowered back against the fireplace, so close that the hem of her dress began to scorch. She was alone in this musty old country house, and the deep pine woods separated her by a good mile from the village. From any ordinary prowler, she was comparatively safe.

Frank had insisted on making sure before he went that all windows were safely locked. He'd made her promise to shoot home the two heavy bolts on the big front door as well. But there was something eerie about the way whatever it was outside fumbled at the barrier, a strange quality of blindness of mindlessness. Oh, if only Frank was here, with his capable shoulders and easy, confident smile.

But he was gone, had been for hours. Overwhelming dread seized Laura Standish, as she listened to the aimless groping. The strange slithering sounds along the stout pine of the door. Had the thing outside caught Frank unaware as he was hurrying back to her? Was his dear body even now a cold, a mutilated corpse somewhere in the depths of the woods. Did the intruder know that she was alone,

the helpless, unprotected, lovely morsel? She fought herself back to a semblance of sanity. She must not think such thoughts. She forced her trembling voice into just the right mould of casual inquiry. Perhaps if the prowler knew she were not afraid, if he thought there were others in the house with her. Who's there? she called. Still, there was no answer.

Oh, the latch! Oh, God, the latch! It was rising in its cradle, slowly with infinite stealth. She stared at its inexorable movement with eyes that were frozen with terror. A new sound came, a snuffling, whining, eagerness. It held no human quality in its muffled breathing. It was more like the whimper of an animal to whom human doors are insoluble puzzles. Laura exhaled slowly. She'd forgotten.

The bolts in their sockets would hold. The thing outside seemed to realise that too. And the whimper became an angry snarl that pierced the double thickness of the porch. And then silence reigned for an instant. Silence during which Laura, still backed against the fire, felt the blood pounded madly in her veins. Had the snuffling monster given up the attempt? gone away to its lair. The heavy door quivered and bent inward.

The stout iron bolts strained against their sockets. A screw started from its spiral bed and sawdust fell in a tiny cloud to the floor. Again and again came the terrific thumps. The great pine door groaned and sagged under the impact of the repeated blows. Each thought it was a sledgehammer smashing home against Laura's skull. She couldn't move. she couldn't breathe in her terror. No human being could break down that heavy reinforced barrier.

Another slam, and her stiffened lips worked soundlessly. A screw inch's long clatter to the floor. One iron socket dangled uselessly on the precarious thread of a single fastening. A choked scream tore at her throat. Help, Frank, help! She cried in an agony of fear. And then dreadful realization clamored in her brain, sagged her limbs to a feral crouch.

Drank, her husband could not hear. Perhaps never again would he? She glared around with mounting madness. There was no hope, no escape for her. There was a small summer cabin they'd rented for the season, intent only on primitive seclusion and the cozy warmth of the two together alone. The ground floor,

was all one room, a timbered parlour with a gigantic native stone fireplace for its kitchen. Overhead were two bedrooms, now empty and forlorn. There was no rear door through which she could flee, and her fingers twisting frantically at the window latches would bring the mysterious attacker down upon her. Thick, ominous silence succeeded the smash of a heavy body against a weakening portal. The thing had heard her, cry for help, was waiting stealthily. flesh flattened against the rough pine. She could hear the slobbering wheeze of its breath, the whimpering sound in its throat.

Oh God, what dreadful monster was crouching out there, waiting for her to cry out again, resting before the final attempt that would bring the door, hinges and all, crashing to the ground. In the very extremity of her fear, Laura found new strength. She must see what it was, had come out of the night that sought terrible entrance into the lonely cabin she must see before it was too late her limbs were no longer part of her they moved her away from the dull red embers of the hearth across a long interminable expanse of flooring where the shadows ebbed and flowed with each flicker of the dying flames toward the thick curtained window that gave on the porch one dreadful thought swelled and swelled inside his skull until the

till the thin bone ached and reeled under its impact. Why was the attacker slamming with unhuman strength against the door? Why had he not forced an easier entrance through a window? She shrank desperately from the sinister implications of that thought. She spewed it out like an unclean thing. Outside the whimper grew to an eager, slavering wine. It had heard her slow, tortured progress across the floor, and it was waiting for her to open the door.

The thought rocked her consciousness, made her senses real and swim. She tore at the heavy stuff of the curtain with terror strong hands. It swung back to disclose a long, narrow panel of corpse-white luminance. A cold dead moon struggled to pierce the dense black shadows of the pines,

the taller gloom of the hemlocks. A little beyond, where the old lumber road bent in an art, the house, and the victorious beams bunched in an irregular patch of leprous white. But Laura saw only the crouching thing on the porch. It was flattened against the tottering door as if it were listening, waiting. A slanting dart of moonlight spread shudderingly over its massive frame, bathing it in an eerie glow that paralysed her limbs and exploded red horror in her brain. And as if it had heard the moan,

that tore involuntarily from her pallid lips, the Lancaster sprang away from the door and turned its head. For one long, terrible moment their eyes met, locked. Dear God, it was a man, but a man such as Laura had never seen before. No light of human reason showed in those glaring eyeballs, or softened the bestial madness of the ape-like face. Yellow froth dripped from the corners of the slobbering mouth, and the thick specky, The fume gurgled audibly in its throat. Worn tattered pants and an even more tattered shirt of indistinguishable hue covered the barrel thickness of the body. Long hairy arms dangled almost to the ground.

Laura tried to shrink back, but couldn't. Her hand gripped the curtain as if glued. Her muscles were beyond control. She knew now that the man outside was mad. Stark, irretrievably mad. Prayers, pleased from mercy, could not penetrate that distorted brain. She was beyond all help, all human aid. The madman whirled on bare, misshapen feet like a cat.

His right hand, hidden in the shadows, swung into view. Great, God in heaven, the moon glinted with unholy glee on a broad band of grayish metal that encircled his powerful wrist and sprayed in a shower of frozen light on the chain that dangled their from. The last link showed jagged, broken edges of metal where it had been snapped into. Laura felt herself fainting. Yet she didn't fall. She tried to tear her hand away from the revealing curtain to run madly, anywhere away from that awful sight. But a nightmare paralysis held her in icy embrace. The madman had been chained like a wild beast, like a slave,

and he'd broken away with superhuman strength to roam the wild woods and to find her a hapless victim for his maniacal will. The creature thrust his manacled hand toward the window in a strange gesture. The lynx rattled hideously. He opened his thick lips and a curious whimpering like that of a beaten dog spewed from his mouth, as if, as if almost, he were imploring her to open the door to let him in. Terra flared in Laura's eyes.

She dared not, she must not. It was the cunning born of a diseased mind, luring her to destruction. The maniac seemed to sense her loathing, to read her great fear aright. A change came over his bestial face then. His lips snar back to show yellowed teeth, and he lunged against the already battered portal.

There was a great rending sound. The loosened bolt flew with a doomful thud to the floor, Only one shaky bolt remained between her and his raging lust. He heaved back again, shoulder arched for the final blow. Laura came to desperate life then, little sobs who whimpered in her throat, cataracts of ceaseless blood made turbulent noise in her ears. Her unlocked fingers flew to the catch on the window, and tug frantically on its rusty iron.

If only she could twist the stubborn metal, swing up the window in one swift heave and catapotting. her slender body through the opening, just as the madman rushed in the door, then perhaps the maniac hunched forward, heedless of her puny efforts. His darkened mind could not associate the window with entrance or exit. In seconds he would be through, and upon her shrinking body. Still, the window catch embedded with all of Frank's lean strength refused to give. With sudden, awful clarity, she knew it would not open.

The flame of hideous triumph glowed on the madman's brute face. His shoulder bent against the portal. It tottered, split, and the night air swirled through the crack with beating wings. Laura shrieked and lifted her small white fist to smash out the pane of glass. Wild Hope swept like a consuming blaze through Laura's shaking form. She was saved. That thudding noise was from the old lumber road. It was a sound of many men, slogging along through the rutted dirt.

She would shout, she would shriek, she would pour all her desperate terror into one last cry. They'd come running, those unseen, blessed men, they would rescue her from this obscene thing outside. And perhaps even, her bursting heart bounded even more madly than before, Frank was with them, hurrying them back to save his Laura. already the monster had heard and was afraid. He whirled away from the sagging half-open door and darted back into the shadows, a crouched, dim-seeing animal. Wimpers of fear rumbled in his hairy throat.

Fierce joy surged through her veins, she thrust back the heavy shrouded curtain and raised her clenched fist to slam against the glass, and she opened her mouth to cry for help. But the cry choked back in her throat with a sudden torqueness of muscles. Her hand fell like a leaden weight to her side. A horrible thought had seared her brain and clogged her veins with ice. Much louder now, nearer coming down the mountain, beating out a steady, slogging rhythm,

a strange, satanic form of music. One, two, one, two, my. March, march, clash of metal on metal, one foot up, the other foot down. Laura caught at the window cell to keep from falling. Her scalp was a squeezing cap of horror, her lungs fought for breath. She knew now what caused that eerie sound. It was the chains of manacled men, marching things coming down the mountain after her. Coming to help their fellow monster, coming to cut off all hard.

hope of her escape. On and on they came, still invisible, still shrouded by the dark, massed pines, jane's glanking, metal ringing in horrible unison. The madman in the shadow stirred, whined, and was gone into the night like a ghost called back to its grave. But she knew why he went. He was joining that hideous group of his fellows, summoning them with slobbering whimpers to the attack. She stood at the window, like a movable stone, left hand still frozen to the curtain hem. Her brain shrieked madly, run, while there's still time, out of the door into the woods, anywhere before they come for you. But her muscles were tight knots of flesh, and her skin a leaded coffin. Now it was too late. The ominous clank of the chains burst upon her frozen senses

with a wild, triumphant chant. Out there where the road bent in an arc, and the moonlight lay in a splotch of scabby, leprous white on the grey dirt, a figure moved. For one moment it stopped and lifted its head, bathed in the cold, dead spotlight of hell's own theatre. Oh, great God in heaven,

the face that turned toward the house, as if it saw her fear rigid at the window, was the face similar to that of the madman who just slunk away from her porch. The glare was gone from this one's eyes, the snar from his flabby lips. His huge, knotted shoulders bowed forward in an abject servitude,

as if crushed under unutterable weights. The links of the manacle encircling his wrist stretched back into the blackness from which he'd stepped. A new band of metal enclosed the thickness of his ankle. And for a moment he hesitated. His brutish face vacant, with the quenched embers of madness. Then a strange hissing sound from the rear,

and he jerked forward his head, hunched his shoulders and stepped into the blackness of eternity. Laura's heart was pounding, so she'd not sensed the momentary cessation of that devil's march. The jewel chains writhed across the dead white patch of moon like disembodied serpents, endless, gleaming with unholy lustre. All her faculties were concentrated on that small spot of love.

light. What was coming next? What dreadful portent to snap the bonds of her reason? The lynx jerked, taught. Another figure lurched forward into the moon, blinked, raised his head. Black mindless eyes bored into her very soul, shriveled it to nothingness. Mad, mad, every last one of them. Mad men chained to each other like wild beasts, much along the road like slaves to some dreadful auction block. Hate distorted his stuppled countenance. Mad lust leered at her from under a mop of uncut hair. His chains clanked startlingly.

He lurched toward the house with sudden motion. He'd seen the terrified girl at the window now. Again that sinister hissing sound. He jerked backward, the link stiff as ramrods. Unutterable terror flared like sheet lightning over his hideous, letcherous face. His head bent low, his shaggy form strained forward. And the chains resumed their rhythmic clanking, darkness swallowing him whole. Oh, God, was there no end. More chains writhing through the moon-flooded spot. Another bowed and mindless figure, stumbling through the patch,

blind and weary, not pausing in his staggering pace, not lifting his head. Black Knight infalted him, too, And still another figure moved into the light, shaking his head from side to side, leaping upward with little, grotesque hops, jerked downward by the restraining metal, mouth-wide in horrible, soundless chuckles. He was even more dreadful in his mindless mirth than the others. And still, the double chains writhed backward into the night, an endless marching army of the damned, hell's creatures clanking their way from blackness to blackness. Laura could stand it no longer.

Her throat was a strangling fire, her body a shivering lump of ice. Madness plucked at her own brain, leered at her with eyes like those of the manacled things, inviting her with loathom whispers to join that possession of the doomed. With the last grim shreds of her reason, she held back the shrieks, held back from rushing out into the night. The road bent in a sharp curve around the hand, The clanking madmen now enfolded her, hemmed her in on three sides.

Behind was the grim precipitous upthrust of superstition mountain. Soon they would turn, creep forward through the murk, and spring upon her with horrid slatherings. Her heart wrapped out a last desperate tattoo and then stopped altogether. Everything stopped. Every process of her. process of her being. The room, the night, the earth, the universe, frozen like a run-down clock. This was death. Or worse. Chapter 2. Terror that walked by night. Out in that little spotlight of the damned, another figure had moved, another unit in that endless, terrible procession. He was thinner than the others, and his clothes, ripped and torn though they were, held still a semblance

of civilisation. His lean, etched head was lowered, and the chains clanked dismally from his wrist and ankle. The moonlight gloated over his form, slithered over every slender line. He jerked his head upward, dug his heel in the dirt for a sudden stop. The chains tightened and clashed with harsh, metallic noises. His eyes, wide dark, blank seeming. were fixed on the house, on the very window where Laura stood, turned to a nightmare marble. The universe stopped and then crashed into a headlong ruin. That staring face, smeared with filth, hollow with a sagging stupor of the idiot. That was a face of Frank, her husband.

For one long second her heart was a small, still born. For one eternal second her mind was as blank and dark as the faces of the madman, as even Franks was. Then heart and lungs and brains seethed and roared with whelming floods. She whimpered in her throat like an animal in pain. It was impossible. It wasn't true.

It was a delusion, a frightful dream come to torment her. What was Frank her adored Frank doing in that dreadful company? No. No, he was still down in the village buying supplies. Something had happened to delay him. He'd met someone he knew. They were talking, unmindful of the time. Yes, that was it.

Certainly this was all a bad dream from which she would soon awaken, shuddering and gasping with strange, remembered terrors. And Frank, his dear face aglow as ever with live intelligence and with tenderness for his wife, would be shaking her gently by the shoulder. She held on to that thought, turned it and twisted it in her half-mad mind. Madness, madness, she was mad, not them outside. It was all only a trick of the fiendish moon, done to plague her.

Oh Lord, please don't let them torment me like this. Please drive them away. But the figure of Frank refused to fade into mist as had the others. His silo's eyes clutched at the window. It didn't seem to see. Then she knew it was true that it was real. The curtain ripped away in our down-gripping hands. She lunged against the window, eyes wide, mouth grim with a force beyond her.

all fear. Her husband was out there, chained like a wild beast, broken to a mindless wretch. But he was hers. Hers! She must get to him, she must rescue him, tend to him carefully. Nothing else mattered. The window then was the quickest, shortest way. Glass crashed under her beating fist. The jagged shards pierced her delicate fingers, gashed them cruelly. But she didn't even feel the pain. She just raised her bleeding hand to smash out the rest. Frank's head came higher. Was that a flicker of light, a mere spark of moon in his eyes?

Or was it a warning? She had no chance to know. Out of the blackness of the road behind leaped a figure. His form was shrouded in a mantle of swirling black. His head was a startling mask of white. The moon beat in vain against the grey baldness of his heads, the white bushyness of his eyebrows, and the snarl that contorted his bloodless features.

His right arm was uplifted and a long, snaky whip swept downward with a hissing sound. The lash whistled on Frank's bent back, bit deep in shuddering agony. A quiver raced across his dirt-incrusted countenance, then it was wiped clean of all expression, vacuous with the dreadful emptiness of the mad. Frank stumbled, lurched forward, head bowed down like the others. He moved out from the world. ghastly spotlight into the hellish darkness of the trees, with nether a backward glance.

After him strode the jailer, whip hissing and writhing, his face turned momentarily toward Laura, a leering object of evil, and then he too vanished into the murk. Laura must have shrieked then, woods and chateaued window and the moon above joined in a devil's dance, round and round, and round, a blur of whips and mouth. Mawthing maniacs insistent on the rhythm of clanking chains. Further and further, fading away then closer, closer, strangely transmuted into a hissing and crackling like... Shurped her eyes, looked wildly around.

Where was she? The room was a thing of groping shadows. The logs on the hearth were dull, red embers. At one end a last charred stick had fallen, flared into a fantastic flame, crackled, and died again. It was that which had brought her out of her faint. Faint! Laura struggled unsteadily to her feet,

looked with dull wonder at her bleeding arm, pressed it to her aching head. What had happened? Why had she fallen down? The night wind blew across her cheek. Good Lord, she must have left the door open, or Frank had... Frank!

The name forced its way out into a tearing crescendo of remembered terror. Frank! It all came back in a nightmare of sweat that drenched her limbs. Frank! Frank! she screamed again, and then plunged for the sagging door. With undreamt of strength she ripped open the last loose bolt, sent the crazy barrier crashing to the ground. Outer onto the port she ran, calling again and again.

Frank! But the anguish name was lost in the muttering forest, in the unrelieved blackness of the night. The moon had dropped behind superstition mountain, and the glacial stars mocked her desperation. The road was a dim thread of darkling stuff, and the leprous patch was gone. Silence pressed down upon her with weighted shrouds. No sound of chains or thudding feet, or of hissing whip. The chained madmen had gone their clanking way, and with them was Frank. Frank, who had seemed as mad as they, bound to them in hideous life and death.

Oh God, she mustn't go mad. That was what they wanted, that hellish crew and still more hellish jailer. Perhaps out there in this stygian gloom they still lurked, moving forward with each rustle of the masking night breeze, coming to drag her down with them. Her eyes were balls of fire, her ears of straining tension. The night closed in on her with sea. stealthy whispers. Alone. All alone in a forest of evil where mindless things gloated and lusted for her. Oh, if only Frank, she sobbed aloud, and the sound was like plunging knives. Frank was out there, too.

She must save her husband. Fear dropped from her like an outworn garment then, and her brain cleared. She must get help to rescue him to rid its squam village of the marching holler. One mile down the winding dirt road lay that village, one long mile of unrelieved darkness in shapes and sounds and things in chains. The skin crawled over her flesh, but she forced herself down the steps, across the little clearing and into the road. If only she'd had a flashlight, but the batteries had gone dead in the old one, and Frank had expected to buy new ones in the village.

On and on she went, groping her way along, smashing into trees, tripping over unseen roots, hearing the loud thud of blood in her ears, hearkening to the scuttering noises of the woods, panting, gasping for breath, jerking with unimaginable terror when a ghostly branch whipped across her face. She must have been delirious half the time. Her blurred senses gave no clear impression of that dreadful flight. But indomitable will, the flame of her love for her husband forced her on and on. The invisible road dipped sharply. Below her, nesting in a hollow was the tiny village of squaw. It was an oasis in a wide-flung desert of pine and towering hemlocks. A single light glowed ahead, in the very centre of a clump of huddled shapes.

Its feeble yellow flame struggled wanly through an oblong of dirt-encrusted window. His tiny flicker died in hopeless struggle with the encroaching darkness. But the glare of a thousand arcs, the brilliant illumination of the great white way, could not have been more welcome to Laura just then. The tears streamed down her pallet cheeks as she flogged her tottering limbs toward that glimmer of hope. She swayed uncertainly across the threshold of the general store, squam's only business mart and focal centre.

Here amid boxes of crackers and open boughs of sugar, between fly-specked counter and shelves bulging with faded calico bolts and unsolved axes, hugging the pot-bellied stove in winter and spitting, dexterous gobs of tobacco juice against its cold grey sides in summer, congregated nightly the menfolk of squam. Here, under the roomy eyes of old Matt Kroll, owner and tutelery genius, were settled the profoundest political problems of the nation,

as well as the proper bait to use for pickerel in the nearby lakes. A single lantern swayed drunkenly from a cobweb drafter. The air was drowsy with cheap tobacco and the odor of much-worn clothes. A half-dozen men sprawled negligently over as many boxes, their forms indistinct in the wavering yellow smoke. Old Matt was saying in his high, querulous voice, edged with anger at some unexpected opposition. I tell you, Lamb, seen him with my own eyes, down in the holler, I'm marching under the moon and... Laura caught at the door jam, fought for breath. These men would help her. They'd find Frank for her.

her. They were natives born and raised in these woods. They tracked down the man with a whip and his hellish rout. Lem saw her first. He clucked out a warning that made Matt break off abruptly. Lem was the town cobbler and village atheist. He and Matt were forever arguing about the old wives' tales that clustered around superstition mountain. But now the sneer was wiped off his dark, barley face, and fear leaped into his snapping black eyes. Matt suspended his last word in mid-air, and his jaw gaped as if he'd seen a ghost. The other men, workers in the lumber camps, turned negligent, stably faces toward the girl framed in the doorway, and froze as they were.

Miss Standish, hey, Matt cackled with obvious effort. Well, it sure is good to see you. I was just telling the boys. Some inner reserve of strength pushed Laura into the centre of the room. Matt wavered and stopped. No one noticed. All eyes were intent on the panting girl.

A death-like silence enveloped her. My husband, Mr. Standish, she gasped. He's... He's... There was secret terror in the furtive glances that they gave each other. Lem averted his eyes, broke in hastily. "'Why, sure, Mrs. Stadish, he was here about three hours ago, got himself some groceries, and went on home.

Didn't he now, Matt?' The Matt's shrunken face was suddenly more shrunken than before. He mumbled over toothless gums what might have been confirmation. "'But he never reached home,' Laura cried desperately. "'He never reached home,' she repeated with a dreadful soul. "'No one moved. No one stirred. the lifting layers of smoke seemed frozen in the air. I sought eye stealthily, thin lips licked secretively. Silence eddied about Laura like a hostile sea. Lem's swarthy face was a dirty grey.

He chuckled with forced heartiness. Mr. Stadish must have taken the long way back. Perhaps he stopped at bottomless pond to catch himself a mess of bass for supper. but a self-officient rar from old mad, didn't he now? Well, there was a chorus of eager grunts. Laura looked wildly around at their dim-seen faces. They knew something, something dreadful, and they were hiding it from her. You don't understand, she cried imploringly.

I saw Frank, he was, he was, he was, she fought against rigid throat muscles at the memory. He was in chains, manacled with madmen. God! She hid her eyes shudderingly. They marched and clanked and a thing with a whip beat on them. She took her hands away and screamed out. Frank will go mad.

They'll kill him. You must save him. The box fell over with a startling crash. They jittered to their feet, babbling hoarsely. Their hands trembled and their jaws twitched with uncontrollable nerves, and their stubbly faces grew gray with fear. "'You're a crazy girl,' them snarled through stiffen lips.

"'You've been dreaming, seeing things in your sleep. "'Bet Mr. Stadgett's home right now, wondering what's coming you?' "'Two lumberjacks in the rear. "'Great hulking fellows shuffled furtively toward the rear of the store, "'where a door led out to the back road. "'Shoulders hunched, they slunk out into the night. "'Old Matt, the storekeeper, opened his mouth, "'gulped, but no words were,

were issued. "'Lim's right,' a lanky woodsman muttered, and eased unobtrusively toward the door. Scorn, sneering anger effaced all other emotions in Laura. These men were afraid, that was it, deathly afraid of something. They wouldn't help. They dared not help. They were trying to make her out as mad, subject to hallucinations.

She did not seem. God, if only she hadn't. "'See how they were scattering like chaff, slinking away into the night like cowardly rabbits?' "'I did not dream,' she blazed, and you, and you, and you!' She stabbed an accusing finger at each cowering man in turn. "'You know it as well as I. You're afraid. Cowards all of you!' Then her scorn broke down, and she was a frightened, sobbing girl again. "'Please!' she implored, and choked over the words.

"'Help, my Frank! "'They've made a mad thing out of him. "'They're whipping him with terrible whips. "'Oh, please!' "'They looked at each other uneasily. "'Terror was bright in their eyes. "'The gangling woodsman had already edged toward the entrance, "'and he moved suddenly into the blackness.

"'There was an oath, an exclamation, "'a squeal of terror from the escaping man "'as he rebounded back into the room, "'feet clumping angrily. "'Good Lord, Wally. "'What's the matter?' with you, someone said gruffly. Wally shrank against the shelves,

trembling like a leaf. Two men entered with hearty, banging strides like a breath of fresh air into that brooding, fetid room. Laura gave vent to a gasp of relief. Here were men who'd understand, who'd believe her. More, they would act.

They'd force these others into shamed movement. Thank God you've come, Sheriff, she cried. Hello. The tall spare man with the greying hair and grim, weathered face stopped short, with an air of surprise. What are you doing out of this time an hour, Mr. Stander? His companion, a stout, rubicund individual with a bright gold-watched chain across his ample stomach, and a shabby stethoscope, peeping out of his vest-pocket, looked quickly at Laura's drawn, bloodless face, then at the staring silent men in the store.

He was a village physician, Dr. Alva Carey. he'd stopped several times at their cottage to pass the time of day what's happened laura he asked sharply everything was a haze to her precious minutes were passing while frank she sobbed out you must believe me madman with a monster who whips them they've caught my husband they have him chained they're driving him mad doctor sheriff you must you must save him I was a split second of hesitation in which time seemed to stand still. Would they think her mad to, as those others pretended, would they? Dr. Alvacari cleared his throat. That little sound crashed upon Laura with the dreadful effect of a thousand tons. Oh God, he didn't believe.

I'd, um, suggest, he said with careful casualness. A little sleeping draft tonight, Laura. He then fished in his capacious pocket, pulled out a fold of brown paper and extended it to her. She dashed it violently out of his hands. It dropped to the floor, burst open, and white crystalline powder sprinkled over the dirty pine boards. Oh, fools! Fools! All of them!

She caught hold of the sheriff's rusty black coat with a desperate imploring gesture. Sheriff, I demand you do your duty. I tell you I saw him with my own eyes. marching in chains right in front of my own house. I saw Frank. He stopped, looked at me. And then that frightful monster whipped him on.

Oh, if you don't hurry, it'll be too late. Too late. Sheriff Tom Beasley looked down at the panting, swaying girl. His lips tightened. And there was perceptible hesitation in his manner. Well, Mrs. Standish, he drawled. If you put it that way, I suppose there's nothing else for me to do

but go hunting through the woods. "'But they're tailor yours, as Dr. Carey can tell you. "'It's one of the oldest stories we've got round his hair parts. "'That's how superstition mountain, bag of your place, got its name.' "'Dr. Carey nodded absently. "'That's right, Lara,' he muttered. "'But his manner was fidgety as if he were anxious to get away.' "'But you will go, won't you, Sheriff?' she implored.

"'Sharef Beasley sighed audibly, tightened his belt, looked with longing eyes at the ancient stove, plentifully decorated with tobacco juice, spat and then said, "'Or at this minute, ma'am, I'll get out right now and comb the woods. My advice to you, though, is to go back home, see if maybe your husband's there by this time.' The sheriff turned to the silent few who were left in the store. "'And you boys want to help me?' he inquired genially. "'I'll swear you in as deputies.'

No one answered. As one man, the lumberjacks drifted to the door, vanished hastily into the night. Lem brought up the rear. His dark-glowing eyes were full on Laura as he passed, and then he too was gone. Dr. Carey fidgeted and looked at his watch. Good Lord, he muttered. I've got a car to make. Bye, Laura.

Don't worry. Frank'll be all right. I bet he's waiting for you now. And then he was out hastily. The next moment the rattled bang of his ford made thundering echoes along the road. Sheriff Beasley looked at Matt Crom, the storekeeper, who seemed as if frozen behind his counter and chuckled morosely. Ah, what's the help of peace off as a getts in Squamay, Matt?

He then turned to Laura. Oh, don't you go worrying, he advised. And all these words like a book. If there's a bunch like you say in there, I'll get them. His grim lips were a straight, compressed line, and his lean, sinewy hand patted the holster that protruded underneath the rusty black of his coat. A tarnished star gleamed dully on his shirt. But Laura detected skepticism in his frosty blue eyes and saw the imperceptible wink he tipped old mat. Then he clumped through the door, down the sagging steps, and his boots made dull, thudding noises in the night, and died away to a faint shrewd.

shuffle. Chapter 3. The Hand Prince of Horror. Laura pressed her hand to her burning temples. No one believed her, not even the sheriff. And yet, faint hope, he had promised help. He was efficient. He knew the woods. So perhaps... A dollache pervaded her being. Somehow she knew that Beasley would never find Frank. That skull-faced man with a whip, driving his chained maniacs along, No human being could find him. A little moan parted her jowled lips. Old Mac Crawl stirred. His shrunken visage was a faint blur behind the counter.

What game to do now, Miss Standish? His voice was high and querulous. Laura started. She'd forgotten he was still there. Suddenly she was afraid of this store, with his flickering yellow shadows of the wise and storekeeper whose roomy eyes blinked like those of a cat. I'm going back home, she gasped.

Perhaps my husband has returned. Perhaps it was all. She was nearing the door, poised for flight. She stopped, lifted a bewildered hand to her forehead. Was it possible this was all a dreadful dream, that she had never even seen? Matt pressed the counter with stiff fingers, a driving terror cracking his voice.

Don't you do that, Miss Standish. For God's sake, don't you go back to that place. Stay here in the village. I'll put you up in my place. Only don't go back. If it's... He broke off then, and clamped his trembling lips tight.

He'd said too much, but Laura shook her head wearily. I must, she said, very low. If Frank is there, he'll need me. I look, thanks. She fled out into the cool air, driving her aching limbs through the murky dark once more. Matt's quavering accents followed her, horse with warning, with fear. Don't go. Wait, I want to... But the dense marching trees swallowed his words. Up and up, she climbed, up to the base of Superstition Mountain, where their cottage nestled,

the secluded, lonely house in which they'd planned to spend such a lovely summer. Laura's lips drew back in a bitter groan even as she flogged her way through the impenetrable darkness. Each tree was a thing of menace, behind which lurked a maniac with the glaring eyes, each whisper of wind in the branches, the crackling hiss of the whip, each rock that loosened beneath her pounding feet clashed with the sound of chains. But one driving purpose held her from going mad, from falling headlong, a gibbering, screaming thing into the crowded forest. Frank was home, waiting for her, wondering where she was, worrying. All the men in the store had said so.

Dr. Carey was sure of it. They ought to know. They knew this place and all its tales. She must have imagined it, of course. Something that she'd heard in the village and forgotten, had troubled her dreams in front of the waning fire. She had slept, hasn't she? She pumped air into her gasping lungs then.

It was all very natural. she hadn't awakened until much later with a dream thick upon her, and she'd rushed out like a madwoman. How frank would laugh and scold her in that gentle way of his, how the village folk would gossip and whisper about her nerves behind her back. She could never face them again. But, and dread then cramped her limbs once more. They had known.

She'd seen it in their faces, in the way they'd slunk from her presence as if she were a plague. She lashed on in the stitching gloom, heedless of ripping branches and stumbling feet. What terrible conspiracy of silence had been wrapped around her. What awful the thing was being hidden from her. They knew what had happened to her husband. They knew when the blood had drained from their faces, had locked their lips in frozen fear. The faint starshine disclosed the clearing ahead. The place where the chained madmen and Frank had clanked their waltzed.

to hell. Nothing was there now, nothing but slinking shadows in a blob of trees. She turned up the path with feet that suddenly dragged. Her heart was a pounding trip-hammer. Anticipation squeezed her skull. Soon, she would know. The house loomed like an unquiet shadow. A faint flicker of red peeped out at her and died into the merest glimmer.

Her heart stopped pumping. She swayed, forced to her. herself to stand once more. That was true then. She hadn't been dreaming. The door lay on the porch just as it had fallen, and that little whisper of flame was the dying hearth fire in the living room.

She moved forward like an automaton. Nothing mattered now. Frank was in chains, a maniac held in thrall for some frightful purpose. There was nothing left for her to live for. Nothing. Without knowing what she was doing, she entered, at the living room. A dim glow of red stained the bottom of the fireplace.

Soon it would be gone, and the advancing shadows would claim the place for their own. She shivered, and life flooded her veins again. Oh God, what would she do, alone here, surrounded by creeping shapes, encompassed in darkness? She must have a fire, a great roaring, blazing fire, to chase the grinning maniacs back to their layers, to keep her from going mad through the long, dreadful hours before daylight. There was a stack of wood in the alcove recess, the other side of the half. Frank had chopped it and sawn it to neat lengths only that morning. God, how faint and far away that all seemed.

Good Lord, what was that? She stopped dead in her tracks, whirled around then to face the door. She wanted to scream, but she couldn't. Icey fingers slithered along her spine. Something was coming up the path, dragging, shuffling as if. Dredd encased her in a gelled sheath, held her in a death-like grip. Up the stairs to the porch the thing dragged leaden feet, its breath loud in the stillness, was like a wine. For a moment it hesitated, and the panting grew heavy.

Then, slowly, very slowly, it dragged across the creeping boards, and Laura felt as if she were in a press that grounded her bowels. to powder and crush her frozen flesh into a million splinters. Shrieks tore her throat, yet she couldn't scream. Something dim and shadowy bolted in the doorway. It swayed, straightened, and turned its blurry head from side to side. And then, It was coming in.

The bonds of terror broke. Her body flooded with roaring flame. Shriek after shriek burst from her throat. And the figure jerked to a halt, and then raced forward. Laura! Laura shrank away. Her terror turned her brain. Had it made her insane?

But there was nothing unreal about the arms that gripped her tight, the tremendous flow of endearing expressions, tenderness known only to the two of them. It was Frank who held her close, so close that the thumping of her heart was one with the equally loud pounding of his own. It was Frank who's man. mouth sought hungrily for hers. The ecstasy, the reaction was too much for her, and with a little

moan she sank a limp into his arms. It must have been only a minute after that she awoke dizzily. Fresh wood on the half had just caught, and the yellow blue flames were licking up the sizzling pitch that exuded from the pine. Frank was bending over her, his face in the shadows. Oh, Frank, darling, what a dreadful nightmare I had. "'Can you imagine? I thought you were chained to madman, that you too were. "'Oh, it's all over now. You're back. You're really back.' She extended aching arms towards him. Oh, kiss me dearest. "'But why did he stiffen against her questing arms? Why did he keep his face averted in the shadows?

The terrible fear flared through her bursting veins. She lashed upward to her feet from the couch on which she'd been extended. She caught the hand that hung limply at his side, and the contact sent a chill to her heart. It was cold, icy, cold. Terror seized her again. She dragged him by main force to the fire, kicked with the backward heel at the logs on the grate. They flared into a blaze of sparks. The shadows ebbed away from her, from her husband.

He tried to disengage himself to jump back into the fleeing darkness, but she gregers. gripped him with desperate strength. Frank! The anguish of her voice beat about him like surf on a rocky shore. His face. Oh God, his face! It was blank and grey in the stormy red of the fire. It was cold and hard and bruised,

but the bruises had been washed with painstaking care. In that first moment his eyes, those eyes that had always glared with tender love at the sight of his wife, had held a secret glare, a wild, fearful light she had never seen before. But even as she shrieked, something else struggled in their depths, something excited that tried to mask itself into a poor replica of that former tenderness. A one smile flitted over his grey countenance that chilled her blood even more than the earlier blankness. Frank was trying to conceal himself from her,

to mask from her wifely eyes the hell that raged beneath. "'La,' he muttered. "'Don't be afraid. "'Everything will be all right.' "'How terribly strange and stiff his voice sounded. "'With what effort he spoke.' "'She shrank away from him. "'And it was true.

"'All of it,' she gasped. "'I don't know what you mean,' he said thickly. "'Nothing's true. "'You've been dreaming.' Oh, God, he too thought of that. Or was he pretending, as he would if he were really mad? For the first time in her life she felt fear in the presence of her husband. What are those monsters done to him?

She stared frasidly at his clothes. They were no longer in disarray, as they had been out there. They had been brushed, smoothed out. But a sleeve was rent. A tear showed on a trouser leg. His coat was close about him. as if to hide some dreadful thing beneath. Just tell me the truth.

She came close, caught his shoulders and glared into his eyes. He tried to pull away, but she held him fiercely. Tell me everything. I'm your wife. I won't desert you, Frank. I'll care for you. I'll nurse you. Her voice broke then.

Back to health. Only please tell me. There's nothing to tell. vaguely, and his gaze slithered past her. But I must be getting back. There are things I must do. But you? For the first time, the warmth of human emotion crept back into his voice. You must not stay here, Laura. You must go to the village at once to Dr. Carey. Stay there until you hear from me again, and for God's sake, in the name of our love. Of all we meant to each other, do not ask me any more questions now.

and do not stir from Dr. Carey's house until you hear from me. Do you understand, no matter what else you hear or see? Well, his voice was urgent, imploring now. He gripped her slender arms with fingers that were chilled with cold. His eyes swung to hers, and in their depths was driving depression, but, thank God, no trace of madness. Well, resuade happily. Her husband was sane, as sane as she was.

The whole thing had been a confused nightmare. She'd mistaken someone else who resembled him in that furtive, shimmering moonlight. He'd wanted to protect her. He knew there were unclean things on the mountain. She would not ask any more questions. All right, Frank, she murmured. I'll do as you say. And again she saw that strange gleam in his eyes.

He dropped his hold, tottered his coat pocket, and his arm came out, holding a small flashlight. Here, he said with that strange, strained voice once more, I got it in the village for you. You'll need it to show you the road. She reached for it. His long, lean hand was out, extended, holding the black cylinder with scrubbed fingers.

The sleeve of his coat fell back a bit. No shirt-cuff showed. His wrist protruded, bare and white, bare and... Oh! The flashlight dropped with a clatter to the floor. She'd seen. Oh, God, she had seen. Everything was true, everything.

The house rocked before her fainting vision. Her husband face swung in a hideous, distorted arc. A whimper of fear weased in her throat. Frank caught her haunted gaze and followed it stupidly to its focus on his exposed wrist. A broad red mark encircled his flesh. a sinister band against the dead white pallor of his arm. A metal manacle had dug deep into that skin and shrinking flesh, a manacle which had only recently been removed.

His eyes came up, smouldering, then flared with strange lights. His lips worked madly. He mouthed thick, indistinguishable words. Laura shrank back from the man who was her husband. The terror fought with the great love she'd borne him. In a delirious flash she saw everything. Frank had come back to her. A madman.

It was no longer the man she'd loved. He'd come back transformed, bestial, crafty with the perverted cunning of the insane, to entice her into the woods where his fellow creatures could pounce upon her. And... She flung up a warding hand. Her horror-warp mind burst into a flare of rocketing lights. toneless shrieks tore her frame to shreds. Oh no, her husband too.

A step forward, hands clawing out. She stumbled back, back until her heel thudded against solid wall. And then, suddenly, he stopped and listened with tense fixity. Outside from far away came a faint, terrible sound, the unmistakable hiss of a whip slashing through the night. Frank seemed to hesitate. His clouded gaze swung irresolutely from his whimpering wife to the door. The whip cracked again, nearer this time, louder.

One quick startled glance, and he was racing toward the door, racing as if, oh God, as if his master was calling him. The bonds of fear fell from Laura then. One desperate thought hammered at her brain. He was going back, back to that troop of the damned, back to the hell from which he'd come. He was leaving her forever. She started away from the wall.

She stumbled across the expanse of floor. Tears blinded her eyes, weariness locked her limbs into nightmare slowness. Frank, come back to me. Frank, go. Don't leave me, she wailed. But he did not hear. He couldn't hear. Out there in the woods, black with the blackness of hell,

came swift, rustling sounds, and a sudden crash, followed by a silence thick with unknown terror. Laura stumbled out onto the porch, tripped, fell headlong to hard, unyielding boards. Somewhere far off, before she drifted into oblivion, a thing raised its voice in an eerie, gloating chuckle. An ape-like maniac pressed close over her rigid body. Laura could feel the glare in his red-rimmed eyes, the fetter of his breath. His hands slithered clamily under her shoulder, something hard and unutterably cold pressed against her ribs.

The chain rattled loud in her ear. With a faint shriek she opened her eyes. Dim in the starlight of figure bolt heavily over her. Even as fear parted her lips, it moved away. The small, hard object lifted. The chain gleamed yellow against a rounded background. Dr. Alvacari clucked. soothingly as he crammed his stethoscope back into his vest pocket and jingled his watch-chain.

You gave me quite a turn, Laura. Finding you stretched out unconscious like that, but you're all right. Slowly Laura's fuddled senses focused on reality again, and for a moment she stared upward at the rubicund, kindly-seeming face of the retone doctor. There was something in his eyes that he tried to hide, something that belied the cheerfulness of his smile. She tottered to her feet, and fear beat with thudding wings against her ribs.

What was masked behind that smile? What had he been about to do before she wakened? Dr. Carey moved toward her. How carefully casual his voice was. Frank, come back yet? he asked. Frank! Laura glared wildly around. Great God, had she forgotten?

The broken door leered vacantly back at her. The woods were a darkling, sinister stretch. Superstition Mountain reared its vast, inaccessible bulk directly to the rear, a gigantic, truncated mass of stone against a frost blue sky. She wrung her bleeding hands. He's gone. Again, she wailed. He was here.

He was mad like the rest, and then that whip cracked calling for him, and he went. I must have fainted. All former fears were forgotten in the agony. of that terrible recital. Frank, her husband, was gone forever, a maniac. She caught hold of the doctor's sleeve with imploring desperate gesture. Dr. Carey, she cried.

You must find him. You must save him. The doctor pulled away. His eyes were hard, blue pebbles, and they refused to meet her anguished ones. They stole surreptitiously to the flattened top of the mountain and flicked away again. I'll see what I can do. He muttered evasively.

In the meantime, he continued, and for the first time he stared directly at the girl. I want you to... She shrank away as he moved closer. She was suddenly afraid of this doctor who'd mocked at her story in the village, who had appeared without explanation at this place in the heart of the woods, and who looked at her so strangely. He reached out to lay his hand on her arm, Laura jerk blindly away.

Well to run! When both froze in the room. their tracks as if turned to stone. Far off, so far it seemed to emanate from the distant sky, came a long, drawn-out howl. It was the howl of a man in the last agony of pain. It was the bitter cry of a human being whom torture had bereft of reason. It was the voice of Frank Standish. Closed on its heels came a fainter sound, muffled but unmistakable and sinister in its implications. the sharp hiss of a whip lashing across a bed slashed back. Hiss, crack, swoosh!

But no further answering noise from a tortured throat. Then all was silence again as if the shuddering sky had closed its portals against such dreadful deeds. Laura's flesh crawled on her skeleton, red lightning thundered in a skull. With an inarticulate moan, she tottered forward, stumbled and fell. Dr. Carey stood momentarily motionless on the porch. The starshines shimmered with ghastly pallor on his rounded form. His ruddy smoothness had become grim and hard and grey. His eyes were philiginous flares,

and his lips writhed in grey distortion. So they've started, he snarled. The next instant he was pounding down the steps, over the clearing up the rutted lumber road toward the mountain. Over his shoulder he yelled in a strange, harsh voice, "'Stay where you are, Laura. Don't you dare leave that place.' Then all sound ceased, and the woods became alive with stealth and the noiseless groping of eerie things. Laura rose unsteadily to her feet. Her limbs were water weak, her skin, a prickling sheath of horror.

But one consuming thought blazed in her brain, it seared all fears, or dread for her own safety, to shrivelled, tenuous wisps. Frank had cried out like a mindless animal. Frank was in the clutch of a devil who drove the creatures he'd made mad with whip and clanking chains, and she, and she alone, must save her husband. But where was he?

From what distant lair in that ominous, far-spreading forest had that tortured whale emanated? She clenched her lips until the blood came. Despair overwhelmed her, the woods billowed like a waveless ocean vast and interminable. No further sound drifted to her straining ears. A strange roaring noise she'd heard was a pounding of her own blood.

Suddenly she stiffened. Superstition Mountain. That great truncated block of primial stone slashed this star-studied brambles, scrambling through rubble and sky like a grotesque titan. His treeless granite flanks scowled down upon her, the lowering laughter. Dr. Carey had flicked his surreptitious glance at its ominous bulk, had looked hastily away when he thought he'd seen something.

At Frank's last anguish shriek, he'd raced up the old lumber road, the twin dirt tracks that dwindled to a trail and died abruptly at the grim upthrust of the barrier wall. Dim, half-heard stories, swarmed her fevered brain, crawled into every nook and cranny of her mind. Story she'd heard on the few occasions she'd gone with Frank. to the village to get their mail, to buy supplies. Stories that had been mumbled around the inevitable pot-bellied stove in the general store,

of strange lights that gleamed on certain moonless nights on the soared off top of superstition mountain, where no human being had ever climbed. In the dim, long past, hardier men than those who now inhabited the faded village of squam had tried to scale those sheer granite walls. None had ever returned. No trace of their bodies had ever been found. It was they, claimed the villagers with bated breath, who, neither dead nor alive, were doomed to a dreadful eternity on the inaccessible top of the mountain. Their thin shrieks were heard on still nights as they bent under the lash of the devil who drove them on his hellish business.

They, and others who'd gone into the woods since then and never returned. Death came from causes unknown, from drowning in the bottomless pond, from the wildcats that still lurked in the farther forest, from access. accidental discharge of their own guns. But the natives of Squam knew better, and cowed at night under blankets when the lightnings played over that grim, stony mass, and the crackling thunders were dreadfully like the crack of a snaking whip. Frank had laughed at those stories raucously, and she herself, intent on her purchases from old Macroll, had smiled with half-absent thoughts. Only Lem, the cobbler atheist and Dr. Carey, of the village folk had not believed, and Lemelone had aired his opinions with harsh contempt.

Jabbed a fall, the trail of despair. Laura's body became rigid with sudden driving purpose. She clattered over the fallen door into the parlour. The fire in the hearth had died to dull grey ashes. The boards creak loudly underneath. But her seeking foot crunched against the flashlight Frank had dropped. She groped for it and found it. A flick of a frozen finger and a thin pencil of white light

stabbed through the murk. Out in the moonless night again, flogging her numbed limbs along under the whip of her will. Hurry! Hurry! The elongated oval of luminance pierced like a pointing sword before her. She raced across the open patch, thudded with slim, high-heeled shoes over the rough, uneven ruts of the road.

The woods raced with her, the trees bent down over the tree, trail, plucked at her with slithering branches. The ground heaved and rocked unevenly with her insane flight. Unseen shapes padded stealthily through the black masses on either side, closing in on her with furtive gait. The stars gleamed wanly overhead and shared no radiance. The beam of light board a tunnel of whiteness through the solid blackness and tilted up and up. The road was climbing. The road became the trail and then a thread of forgotten hooves. The trees were giving way to stunted furs, to tangled underbrush.

Superstition Mountain halt ominously above. On and on she drove, the breath wheezing in her lungs, her heart is squeezing gout of blood. She held her eyes desperately ahead, focused on the beam that bobbed before her. She dared not look behind. That insistent sound was. merely the thump of her own heart, the pounding in her own ears, but even as she clammed it to herself, she knew that it was not true. Someone, something was following her up the trail, was even now increasing its pace. Oh God, they were coming for her, the things that were

chained, the hoard which had claimed her husband. They were coming to drag her, shrieking insanely to their master, he of the lash and horrible white head. Fast-rearer. Fast-reary. and faster she flared, heedless of twining saplings on the first slope of the mountain. Behind her, aloud with doom, were pantings that were not her own, gusty sounds that did not issue from her throat. It seemed as if they were calling her, trying to slow down her pistoning limbs. Her fingers froze to the flash. Her lungs were bellows without any air. The thing behind was gaining, and soon it would be upon her. It would. Insanity poured its jimmering turmoil into her brain.

Laura didn't know she was running and sobbing wildly now, didn't know that even the trail was gone, that the mountain was a sky-climbing wall just ahead. One maniacal desire hammered at the confines of her skull. She must see this thing that pursued her through the night. She must laugh shrill and loud in its face. Face. Perhaps it had no face. Perhaps it was an insubstantial horror, an excrescence out of hell. No matter, the desire to laugh to shrill out her answering mockery became an overwhelming madness. She thrust her corpse-rigid head back over her

shoulder. Her features glared with impending insanity. In her delirium, she didn't realize that her back was against granite now, pressing into it with numb, icy flesh. She didn't see the silent shape that rose like mist of the underworld out of the solid blackness of the mountain that moved toward her without a sound with shadowy tentacles outspread. All her shattering faculties were strained on the thing behind, still clambering and puffing up the grade. She whipped her electric torch suddenly downward, back over the trackless waist she'd just climbed. The white pencil of flame flashed on a scrambling figure that jerked backward in startled fear. It held for a split instant on a swarthy, bony face, on eyes that gleamed like live, dark coals.

The pursuer opened his mouth, and hoarse, strangled sound spewed forth. Then his eyes flicked to one side of her. They went wide with desperate, grinding terror. With a great bound, he heaved out of the oval of radiance into the blackness of the encompassing bushes. The shrill cries accompanied his sliding, plunging retreat, down the rubble. covered mountainside. Laura thrust back her head and laughed. There was madness in that laughter.

There were fiery worms seething in her brain, but her limb shook and her teeth unlocked. It had been lemm, the cobbler of Squam, the village atheist who had followed her, who had fled before the slash of the electric torch. She was safe now, safe to seek her husband,

to get him away from the devils of this mountain. The thought of Frank chased the crawling things from her skull brought her back to sanity She turned to force her way Upward again As she swung around A shadowy shape flowed over her

Suddenly she was enveloped in clinging Clammy folds Her screams strangled in her throat Her flailing hands beat vainly Against insubstantial softness Something sickeningly sweet Seaped into her consciousness then And her thoughts drifted slowly

away. She tried to reach out for them, to hold them tight. Her mind tottered fell into a bottomless pit of blackness. From far up, almost from the sky itself, came a low, snarling chuckle. There was something wrong with this place. It was true, it was night and her eyes were still closed in sleep, but this was not her bedroom on the upper floor of the summer cottage. Laura stirred uneasily, moaned in her drugged days. She thrust out her letharth arctic arm, as she always did when she dreamt and the things she dreamed were frightening. The feel of Frank's arm, warm flesh, the little ridge of muscle along his shoulder-blade, always comforted her, always soothed her trembling nightmare fears back to the sweet

drows of untroubled sleep. But now nothing met her questing fingers, nothing but chill, dank air and hard, damp stone. The dull ache in her head exploded into hurtling shards, the clinging, sickening embrace fled from her limbs. Her pain-heavy lid swung open. Her bewildered eyes fluttered like frightened birds. A scream ached in her throat, jittered thinly through her lips.

She pulled leaden limbs upright from the rocky floor on which she'd been sprawled. No, she'd not been dreaming. It was no nightmare that vanished with a touch with the first level streamer of light through the east-facing window. Terror flooded her being, anew, locked her throat tight. She glared wildly around. God, where was she? Where'd that

shapeless thing which rose out of the depths of hell transported her? Was she dead and buried beneath warming earth in a vaulted grave? All around, enclosing her like a living tomb, was rock and solid curving stone. Shiny black it was, spangled with innumerable pinpoints of fire that lit up the whole round of the chamber with a ghastly, eerie light. Alive and gloating, they seemed, those pinpoints, like baleful eyes mocking her whichever way she turned. The strange radiance bathed her shrinking form in a yellowish aura of flame. It seemed to flow through her silken dress,

to tingle with prickling fingers against her skin. It seemed to slither into quaking flesh, to munch with greedy, invisible mouths at her very bones. Suddenly, she was afraid, unreasoningly, instinctively afraid of the ghastly, probing light which emanated from the walls. More afraid even than she'd been of the madman who'd heaved against her door, of the stumbling, mannical things who had been whipped through the woods. The whole body felt unclean, the skin crawled under the impact of the strange unholy flares. The strength seemed to eb from her body, from her bones, and they could no longer support her. Laura swayed blindly toward the nearer wall, her smarting eyes lowered, blinking against the weird luminance.

She jerked backward with a choked cry. Horace stiffened her spine, held her rigid and unmoving. There, at her very feet, there are ghastly, frightful things. Things that had once been men and now were unmentionable decay. Corpses from which the clothes had long since rotted, glowing in the world. the pale yellow glare with a terrible greenish putrescence of their own. The hard, virulent flesh was pitted and gouged, as if fanged, unhuman monsters had munched their hideous meals. The eyes were holes that yawned in fleshless grinning skulls. The jawbones were

crusted with the dull grey powder. Corpses are men dead for years, on whom the flesh had grown green and hard and pitied, corpses who had been carefully laid out in a grinning, dreadful row for her to see. Laura's skull squeezed like the metal cap on the condemned man's head. Rivers of ice pounded through her veins, crashed sickeningly within her heart. Merciful heaven! These were the men of long ago who dead-scaled at prohibited heights of superstition mountain, who had paid for that temerity with their lives.

What demons out of hell had done? this to them? What fiends had thrust them into this gruesome chamber where the very walls flayed them with unholy light? Light that pitted and burned and seared and held from natural decay. Suddenly, Laura knew that this was to be her fate, but she too was doomed to scrutiny from the myriad baleful eyes hidden in the shiny black walls. She knew that she too soon would be a gouged, green, glowing thing, immured for all eternity with these others. Great tearing shrieks ripped from her pallid lips then, shrieks that mounted and soared to the bursting point of madness. She dashed insanely from side to side, beating on the light-steated walls with bleeding hands. Her stumbling feet kicked against a phosphorescent corpse. They sank deep into the mouldy powder, ghastly dust that rose in a suffocating cloud. This solid-seeming thing, her shoe had touched, had disintegrated into nothingness. She jumped back and pressed her burning eyeballs with frantic fingers.

Insanity knocked with peremptory summons at her brain. Her limbs twitched and her lips were a frozen orifice through which terror and madness went rocketing. A thump penetrated somehow to her shrieking senses. What was that? She whirled round just in time to see a yawning hole in the war, to see two figures come clumping through. Now surely she was mad, even as Frank had been. Shrill laughter, more terrible than any scream, burbled from her lips.

An insane husband and a maniac wife. What a perfect couple to roam the world together. She must find Frank and tell him of this jest. It rocks her sides and tore it at her bones. Frank, she must go to him, tell him. If she weren't mad, how could she have imagined these figures who stood motionless before her. First, a tomb of rock with a million glaring eyes,

then corpses that flamed with a cold green fire, and crumbled into power at the touch. And now these. They were huge, shapeless things with grey, amorphous sides and fingerless appendages, monstrous beasts that stared at her unblinkingly out of round, glassy eyes, setting grey globes that served for heads. Motionless, sinister,

appalling. Like metal monsters they seemed to Laura's half-madmind, spawned in the bows of the earth, soulless beings obedient only to the will of Satan. They stirred simultaneously into clanking movements. Their huge hoof-like feet lifted and thumped down with metallic sound. Their dangling arms, grey and scaly, spread wide to engulf her. The screeching laughter died in Laura's throat. A cold wind stirred her hot dry skin, shivered down her spine. The madness fled, and terror took its place. These monsters were coming for her. Wimpering, she shrank back from the gelid embrace.

On and on they came with a doomful, inexorable tread. The thump of their grey shod feet loud in her ears. Back, ever back, forcing her closer and closer to the chrome spangled rock, While the row of silent, green-tinged corpses grinned up at her with pock-marked laughter. Back, back, while yielding her feet stumbled and slid, and whimpers of fear grew to hopeless shrieks. The monsters didn't seem to hear, though. Their glazed eyes did not waver. Laura felt smooth rock pressed against her back.

She'd reached the limits of the cavern. Pain lanced suddenly through her flesh, a thousand stinging arrows of fire. She swerved desperately away, just as a grey-skinned monster plucked with fingerless, shapeless hands for her body. She stopped short, whirled again, the other loomed in her path, blocking with metal body and terrifying head all means of escape. Moaning, she darted back and forth, in short, frenzied runs while the gruesome pair slowly and undeniably closed in, as if intent on crushing her frail body between their unyielding form. An arm extended clumsily, swung around her slender waist. A baleful, unwinking sphere bent over her.

Within that glassy eye, Laura sensed malignant hate, destroying lust. The touch of that whipping arm was icy hard to her quivering body. With a last despairing scream, Laura rebounded from the gelid contact. Blind, mad with terror, she lunged forward, low like a writherto. wrestler. Her soft flesh smashed against a steel hard leg, caroomed off in a sprawling dive that carried her under a down-clutching arm. She was free for the moment. But the monsters were already turning slowly, clumsily, straggled snars of rage, sounded in what might have been their throats. Yes, they were coming for her again. Laura pushed her trembling limbs erect,

where in this place of horror was their safety from these underworld things. She shrank again from their thudding approach. This time they would get her. This time she could not escape. The breath seemed frozen in her lungs. Her legs were flowing water. She couldn't continue to fight. So the last time she glared wildly around at the circumscribing rock with its unholy sparkle.

A grey monster lunged forward. just missing Laura as she leaped. But she'd seen, and hope flared like a beacon of light in her brain. After one sighed yawned round, blackness. It was the opening in the stony wall through which the subterranean denizens had penetrated. What lay beyond she didn't know, what dreadful horrors awaited her, she did not pause to think. It was her only chance, and even now, where she hesitated,

the farther creature seemed to read her thoughts. He quickened his clumsy gate. In another second, his metal form would be between her and the beckoning cavity. She pivoted on her heel and ran madly for the opening. Muffled Howls crashed in her eardrums, then blackness swallowed her hole. Her feet raced across the stony ground, forced her panting form up and up what seemed like an endless tunnel. Behind her the thick murk was loud with the pounding noise of pursuit. Laura sped on, careening off walls.

bruising her tender flesh against sudden projections, slipping, stumbling, squeezing her tortured lungs for the last reserves of energy. Then, suddenly, the pursuing sound ceased, and she was alone in solid darkness. She leaned against a damp, cold wall, all of her strength gone. What seemed like hours she swayed against the supporting rock, waiting for her pounding heart to slow to normal action, for her blood to stop its mad,

race through her veins. And all the while her every sense was straining, listening for sounds or signs that the monsters had caught up to her. But the strange, breathless silence continued. Were those great ennizons lurking back in the tunnel, blocking escape in that direction? Were they chuckling even now in those muffled, snarling tones of theirs, knowing that worse lay ahead for her, that soon she would rebound desperately, madly, to welcome even their horror. rather than what was ahead at the end of the tunnel. But mercifully, she didn't know. Slowly her limbs resumed their functioning.

Slowly her brain clicked back to a semblance of coherent thought. She must think clearly if she were ever to get out of this frightful place. Where was she? The enshrouding rock returned no answer, but she knew. The shadowy thing had attacked her at the base of superstition mountain, and when she awoke from her, unconsciousness. She was in a cavern. Now she was in a tunnel of solid stone. That meant that somehow she'd been carried into the very bowels of the granite upthrust that even now millions

of tons of solid rock pressed down upon her. Laura repressed the shudder of fear that rippled over her. Evil things were happening within superstition mountain. Maccabre being swarmed in its womb who seemed not of earth or its denizens. And Frank, her husband, Pang, pierced her heart. Where was he? What was being done to him in his mind-clouded state? What dreadful use was being made of him,

of those other chained bestial madmen who clanked with bowed, brutish heads down the lumber path. She started up again, aching for her husband. She must find him. Somewhere ahead, in the dark, upward swing of this mountain, lay the secret, and Frank. She must be brave. She must not give way to the shrieking madness again. Either she would win or, well, life meant nothing without the man she loved.

Chapter 5. The Temple of Torment Laura put out her hand to find the wall. His icy cold sent a shale. shiver up her arm. She moved carefully along, feeling away, trying to make no noise. But her heels clicked terrifyingly loud on the stone. For what seemed like endless hours she stumbled ever up and round and round in her ascending spiral. In God name, when would this end? Suddenly she froze to the supporting wall. She pressed against its frosty surface as if she would push herself

through the very rock. Nightmare terror encased her in a moveless shroud, retching nausea heaved at her stomach. Somewhere, far ahead, came a dreaded familiar sound. The clank, clank of chains dragging against stone, the manacled maniacs were coming for her. Oh God, she couldn't stand this any longer. behind her with the metal creatures waiting for her in the cave of a thousand horrors and in front were madmen with brutish faces and gloating red, lusting eyes. She was trapped,

she had no way to turn, nowhere to run. The clanking grew louder. The rock magnified the sound. The tunnel air caught it and threw it with unholy glee from wall to wall. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, went those naked feet.

Laura pressed tighter to the rock. A tiny flicker of hope pierced her frenzy. The steady, padding march was that of a single pair of misshapen feet. Perhaps in the blanketing dark he would not see her. Perhaps he would pass by unknowing. She stilled herself for the supreme effort. It was closer now. She could hear the sharp rattle of chains,

the banging sound they made as they struck against the rock. Bare feet pressed the stone With a sinister, sucking sound Low, snuffling Wimpers preceded him As he shuffled ceaselessly along Closer and closer Or at issue

The peculiar fetto of this bestial madman An effluvia that turned her stomach And made her faint with its fowlness Here he was Snuffling and whiling like an ailing Dog The noise of his groping approach was overwhelming Laura bit her lips

to keep back the terror that whirled within her. She bruised her flesh in a mad attempt to make herself one with the wall. She held her breath until her lungs were suffocating and bright lights danced before her eyes. Oh God! Please make him

go on. Please make him miss me. He was almost a breath now. His fetid breath was a foul exhalation. Thank God. He was moving ahead. Oh, thank God. Laura gulped in air and then froze again.

He had stopped. In the pitchy blackness, nothing could be seen, but all sound had ceased. Even the whimpering noises in his throat. The silence pressed down on Laura's scar with unbearable weights. He'd heard that sudden intake of breath.

She dared not move, dared not make the faintest noise. Somewhere in the tar-barrel murk crouched the madman Waiting with perverted cunning for her to betray herself A hideous game of hide-and-seek in which she was the mouse Death-like stillness More terrible than any noise grew hideously An enveloping glare of unseen eyes

The stale rank odour of an animal's den tainted the air Laura swayed faintly She fought to hold herself up to control the shuddering of her body. A grim, premonitry clank came to her. The maniac was tired of waning. His chains dragged and his bare feet made that shuffling sound. Along the wall came the slithering noise of a sliding, pressing hand. He was coming back for her.

Every nerve shrieked madly for her to run, but he knew this tunnel and she knew. did not. She could never escape. Her only chance was to stay. Motionless, soundless, hoping. Oh God! Flashes of burning heat and unutterable cold swept over her

quivering form. She was suffocating, bursting with an agony of fear. The slobbering of his brutish lips was loud in her ears now. And something brushed against her side. And a long, choked scream tore from her throat at that contact. She flogged her fainting body away. She tried to run, but too late. A great hairy arm whipped out, caught her in a grip of steel. A hoarse, avid cackle, came out of the darkness then,

and the next instant her thrashing form was lifted into the air. An overpowering stench enfolded her, and she was being carried swiftly, but to wear. How long that dreadful journey took, Laura was never able to tell. Mercifully, her mind was misted, unravelled by the very horror of her situation. It was a sudden cessation of movement, the murmur of strange voices that roused her from her torpor.

Her captor had crouched against the wall. The thick gurgling in his throat had ceased. His filthy fingers dug deep into her form. Feet were moving up the tunnel. A harsh voice raised in anger. The echoes made it hollow. artificial. You damn fools, it said.

You let her get away. Well, if she finds her a way out. Wasn't our fall, boss. Someone else whined placatingly. It so suits why did it. A fellow can't even turn property in one of them there things. Don't be worrying, the third voice spoke up. She ain't got a chance to get out.

We'll find her fast enough. and then. He chuckled, but there was no mirth in that laughter. God help you if you don't, growled the one they called the boss. But he sounded nervous. They were passing close by now, feet thudding in unison. Laura opened her mouth to scream, to cry out for help. They were at least human beings. Perhaps there was mercy in their souls. There could be none in her captor. But the madman sensed her movement, and a great paw clamped down on her mouth, stifling the sound in her throat, choking her with vile odours. And then the noise was further up, fainter and fainter, until it blanked out.

Not until then did the maniac move. The retching noise in his throat was horribly like a peon of triumph. He moved swiftly again, heedless of clanking ends of chains, as if he knew he had nothing. now to fear. And Laura gave herself up wholly for lost. The escape madman was taking her to his secret lair. And then what? Light glimmered ahead.

It was yellow and dim, but it grew stronger as they progressed. Laura opened her pain-haunted eyes. The tunnel was widening. Then they were in a great, irregular cavern. Blinding lights flashed into her face, lights that stabbed and burned her body. Once more she felt as if the bones were rotting within her shrivelling flesh. The jagged walls were alive with a million yellow sparkles, just as the smaller cave beneath had been.

The black gleaming rock was cut and hewn, and mounds of fragments and broken chunks flame with a wild and holy lustre at regularly spaced intervals. It was a place of evil, of stifling almost unbreathable atmosphere. Her captor growled like a wolf whose hackles, bristled against an unknown enemy. He seemed to sense the frightful burden of this blazing cavern, and hastened his shambling walk almost to a run. The chains clanked dismally behind him, and once more his poor clamped over Laura's mouth, shutting off all sounds. Again, the cave narrowed, became another tunnel. The terrible luminescence was left behind, but another and rudder radiance

cast its flare ahead. Cool night air flowed with the night air flowed, reviving vigor over her pain-wracked body and helped mitigate the stupefying elufia of the beast man who pressed her close to his filth stiffened shirt somehow she knew that here was the end of the journey here would come the tremendous denouement of this night of terror and horror what dreadful scene was she a captive to a mindless beast or was she about to witness he was going slowly cautiously now his chains made barely perceptible noise. The tunnel took a bend. A rude plank door blocked the opening to the outer world, but the planks were rough and so nailed as to leave wide gaps between. The mindless being crouched before a crack. His hairy paw tightened on Laura so that her breath

was a choking gasp. The growled in his throat was a low rumble of hate. Fighting for air to fill her lungs, helpless in a grip of iron, Laura nevertheless peered out into the night with him. Before her stretched level rock, the truncated top of superstition mountain, the night pressed down with cold dead stars on the desolate stone, the wind swept in from the sinister emptiness of space. A blood-red fire leapt and mouthed tongues of flame at the whistling blast. Shadowy figures silhouetted blackly against its ruddiness, vanished into encompassing darkness, and then reappeared again like disembodied creatures of the void. But it was not this that held Laura's wide, horror-filled gaze, and brought the shrieks gurgling against the broad, restraining poor.

It was the smooth, round pit that yawned in the solid rock, almost beneath her very eyes. Flames spilled gory shadows into that dreadful hole, and tossed in a bloody scarlet on the unpraised faces that swirled within. Faces allumed there, snarling and bestial, more animal than ape, more cruel in their mindlessness than the wolf. Foam dripped from their protruding, slobbering lips, howls of rage mingled with gruesome cackling and horrible laughter. Great hairy arms swung threateningly up at the figures who moved restlessly about this fire. The blood-red light glinted on manacled wrists and long, pendant chains. One upthrust, naked arm held a long white bone, horribly like the thigh bone of a human being.

The creature who brandished it was chuckling, and as he snarled his eerie laughter, he thrust the gruesome relic into his mouth and crunched on it with a sickening sound. Laura moaned and gagged, her stomach churned with queasy motion. These were the maniacs who had been driven down the lumber road in chains. these and others like them. From this pit had her captors somehow twice escaped, from this pit in which they were manacled and stork like bears for some dreadful sport. Suddenly she twisted with superhuman strength in this madman's arms.

She flung herself free for a moment, and a great shriek of desperation burst from her lips before the smothering hand could grip her down again. She'd seen, in that leaping, twisting, rattling, howling mob of the living dead, Frank, her husband. His lean face was stubbled with a dirt and unshaven beard. His cheeks were hollowed with straining madness, and he leaped and danced and howled wilder and louder than all the rest.

Frank! She screamed in the last extremity of agony at the sight of him. Instantly, the platform of rock was a swirl of movement. The shadowed figures around the fire leaped toward the sound. The madmen whipped up their clamour to a sudden. a hideous pitch. Frank, the man who only that morning had kissed her with understanding affection, seemed to hesitate for a split second. Then he too went on with his interminable leaping and howling. He hadn't even turned his head. Laura's captor whipped his great arm about her throat

with a bestial snarl. She gasped and tried to struggle, but the cruel pressure cut off all air. Searing pain lanced her neck, and then blackness enveloped her. And then, suddenly, the pressure relaxed. The maniac whimpered with fear, and threw her crashing to the ground, then ran with a huge clamour of chains back the way he'd come. "'Get the girl,' the hollow voice ordered. "'Never mind the other he will keep.' She was being lifted, carried out into the open.

The cool night air cut across her fainting senses. the rushing wind stung her back to life. She opened her eyes slowly and closed them again with a long, shuddering mound. Three men stood over her, etched in the flare of the whipping flames. Three men! Two she'd never seen before, though. Vaguely she sensed that they'd been the monsters of metal in the cave of yellow horror beneath. Now they were clad in white, shapeless pants, and semi-sleeved shirts.

They grinned at her with evil, mockery, and the little worms of lust crawled in their narrowed eyes. One was broad and thick and heavy set, with the bullet-head and brutal look of a battered pugilist. The other was like a swooping vulture with a huge, enormous nose, black bent brows and misshapen flapping ears. But it was a third man who'd forced the moan from her padded lips and thrust icy fingers down her spine. Yet he seemed more kindly, as he was more ancient, than his brutish companions. A black shroud swayed his spare form.

A wrinkled, bony mask of white emerged in startling contrast from the midnight robe. The top of his skull was a hairless grey expanse. White bushy eyebrows projected incredibly overshadowed eyes. His mouth was thin and bloodless, and his cheeks of a queer and grey pallor. This was the man with a whip, who had driven his mannical slaves along the road,

who had slashed Frank across the back when he'd stopped in dumb vacuity before the house where his wife had crouched, shivering with terror. The boss motioned with his head, and at once his two companions sprang to Laura, jerked her roughly to her feet. She swayed and couldn't stand.

That bony face before her seemed alive with the wisdom of age, but something in those deep, shadowed eyes sent her heart hammering madly against her ribs. There was more of mercy in the way, those driveling maniacs in the pit than in this tall spare benevolence-seeming creature. What are you one of me? She gasped.

What have you done to my husband? That word almost choked her. Frank, in that pit of mindless men, dancing and leaping and shrieking. Oh, God. For a moment the boss stared motionlessly at the frightened girl. She tried to face him bravely, but the thought of Frank made her wilt into a human pendulum,

swung on the powerful arms of his minions. Oh, yes, your husband, he said finally. His thin lips writhed into a fleshless smile, but the rest of his face didn't move. His voice was like a rumbling echo deep and hollow. He will be useful to me. Already he is more of a madman than the others. It took very little of the precious serum

to blast his reason loose from his mind. Oh, look at him, my dear. See how he really. recognizes you. They swung her around on dragging feet to face the pit. The smooth funnel-like depression became a bedlam of noise and clamor. The maniacs leaped high against their chains at the sight of her, raging lust in flame their bestial countenances,

dragging delirious howls from their maddened throats. Oh, dear God in heaven, just let me die now. She prayed as her husband leaped and yelled with the rest. his eyes glared at her without recognition and his chains were a frenzy of clangor as they dragged him back from his jumping. Ah, there you are, my dear, the boss cackled.

He is indeed a prize. I'm sure he'll be the best worker I have. Something snapped then within Laura, and she tore loose from the restraining arms and jumped screaming and gloring for the beast who taunted her. You vile, filthy creature! she shrieked. You've made animals of men.

You've made a living hell for my husband. And you, for this you shall die. Her clawing fingers raked for his face, when he jumped back with an oath of rage. His lean fingers plucked under his shroud and came forth with a short scimitar-like blade. She hurled herself forward again, ready to transfix herself upon the knife,

if only she could reach that devilish countenance. but the two henchmen were upon her. They caught her plunging form by the arms, wrenched backward until they almost tore them out of their sockets. Sobbing, gasping, whimpering, Laura glared with half-mad eyes at this boss. There was unutterable evil about his lips, in the blazing depths of his eyes.

He fingered his blade menacingly. For one moment it seemed as if he'd drive it into her loud, glamouring heart. Then his eyes flick past her to the pit, where the madmen were yammering more horribly than ever, and his lips curled sinisterly. That would be the cream of the jest, he said thinly. He thrust back his head and laughed then, that bloodless laugh that sent chills down Laura's back, and shriveled her heart to a small, motionless ball.

Yeah, exactly, he nodded with self-satisfaction. It will be great, spoor. I should have thought of that before. Now listen to me, you little she-devil. Listen and faint with very terror. Know what it is that I am doing before you die. The significant pause before that final word, dreadful enough by itself, whipped the madness from her brain and brought in its place crawling maggots of fear.

I have found in the depths of superstition mountain rich deposits of radium ore, the richest in the world. It was I who discovered the tunnels and caverns that lead all the way to the top where we are now standing. But the mountain belongs to someone else. He would not sell. So I am mining the ore in spite of him.

Well, radium is terribly dangerous. He continued. It burns the flesh away and wroughts the bones. My man and myself use leaden helmets and lead impregnated clothes when we descend into the caverns where the pitch-blend load is to be found. But they're clumsy, and it's impossible to work in them.

Besides, I needed more hands for the work, and I dared not trust anyone else. So I thought of a ski. He paused while Laura almost fainted with loathing, with dread of what he was going to say. If I could make men into maniacs, mindless creatures who obey my will, who serve a double purpose.

They would not know the danger, and would mine the awe of me, nor could they betray the secret if they broke away in his gate. I obtained a certain serum, known only to an ancient Indian medicine man that was guaranteed to drive men mad if given in doses at definite intervals, and it worked. Oh, how this beast gloated over his fiendish scheme. Already they have mined enough to make me a millionaire, but I want more. I want to be more. I want to be a fiendish scheme. I want to be a fiendish scheme. I already they have mined enough to make me a millionaire. the richest, most powerful man in the world, and I shall be. An insane light glared in his eyes now.

Another month of toil would this fresh supply of wretches and there'll be enough. But the poor creatures you've tortured, Laura burst out. What happens to them? He was unutterably evil now. They die. A month of toil in the mine and they gangrene and rot away. flesh and bones and all, or from the radium emanations. It is not a pleasant death. They scream and beg for death to come, but it delays. He thrust his snarling lips close to the panting girl now. Your husband will scream louder than the rest.

Iron bands compressed around Laura's skull. You damn fiend, she panted, struggling in the iron grip of the thugs. The boss leered down at her But you haven't heard the rest of my plan And that concerns you Just kill me She gasped

I don't care anymore Oh I shall not kill you He said slowly Leaning for to observe the full effect of his dreadful words Your husband shall kill you He and his lovely mates Yes I shall throw you into the pit with them.

Chapter 6. The Slaves of Madness. For a moment her squeezing brain didn't understand. Then red ruin exploded in her skull. It couldn't be. It was impossible. No human being, not even the foul fiend himself, could have conceived such a frightful torture.

To be torn apart limb from limb by howling, slaughting maniacs, to be broken and twisted and wretched into blood-soaked shreds of flesh by Frank. No longer the man of her love, but rather a ravening, lusting madman. Almighty God, how can you allow such things to be? She felt herself jerked forward, and her feet dragged desperately against the bare, flat rock, seeking footholds. Her head lulled to one side. The thugs were now forcing her into the pit.

There, at the very edge, they paused. Behind them towered the boss, his grey boredness bloody with the light of the fire. He pointed downward toward the mag crew with his knife. Throw her in. For one desperate moment she hung on the brink. She screamed, she begged, she implored for mercy. But hell itself was not more cold, more merciless than these fiends in human form than those lusting, mindless creatures of the pit.

They leapt like slavering dogs against their manacles, tongues lolling from drooling lips at the sight of her. And Frank leapt higher than the rest. His eyes were blank and staring. His voice was a senseless screech. Oh, look how her husband welcomes her. The boss chuckled hideously. Let's not stand in the way of such true love. Throw her down into his arms. No, no, Laura moaned in frenzy. She threw her head back in the scream of snapping reason tore her throat to pieces. Her feet slid along the smooth rock. She was being forced, inexorably over. She made one last desperate attempt at a toehold, but she was going, going.

The last thing she saw was the eager clutch of her husband's unmanacled arm, and then she went down the smooth side, sliding and tumbling. Her hands gripped at her, tore with frenzy claws at her clothes, ripped them into fluttering strips. Mad fingers raked down her smooth, soft, sides, ranched at her arms and legs. Pain lanced through every nerve and quivering muscle. Hot, snarling breathed beat with fetid effluvia about her face, inhuman faces leering into hers, and then dropping suddenly out of sight. Fists and arms and legs and clanking chains

world round and round her tortured form in a kaleidoscope of distributing parts. Shrieks of pain rose from the mindless wretches, yells of rage and howls of agony. and suddenly she was alone, crouched, fainting and bleeding at the farther end of the pit. In front of her was a massive heaving, flailing maniacs. Fists lashed out and crunched home against bone and smearing flesh. Oh God, she moaned to herself. They're fighting over me. Soon it'll be over and the victors will come for me.

But there was something wrong. The boss, who would grin so fiendishly down upon the struggle, now was shouting orders. His henchmen moved carefully around the edge, trying to get to her. The boss ran to the fire, raced back then with his huge black whip. He snaked it crackling through the air, but the madman paid no heed. With the snarl, he aimed the lashing leather at the head of the one who seemed to be leading the riot. He ducked, and it wound himself like a coiling python around the neck of a maniac

who was in the very act of striking him down with manacled arm. He screamed horribly, gurgled and dropped out of sight under the trembling mass. The madman who ducked lashed out again with two unencumbered fists. A brutish face disappeared and bone cracked audibly on another. He then turned his sweaty, thin-etch features toward Laura. She jumped from her terrified crouch. It was Frank, and he was grinning. That old-time grin she knew so well.

His eyes flicked an understanding warning, and then a rush of infuriated maniacs borne down upon him. He was submerged like a racing boat under tons of water. There was a violent, swirling commotion over which the boss teetered vainly, holding his whip poised. His face was hideous with rage now, yet he dared not strike indiscriminately. He had already killed one of his precious, mindless workers. Laura shrieked high above the uproar. Frank wasn't mad, no, he was sane, as sane as she was. But it was no use.

The others were upon him, and they would tear him to pieces, just as they would hurt when they were through. She jumped madly forward, just as a straining hand reached for her shoulder from above. But it missed. She clawed, kicked, and pulled at the ravening throng. They were killing Frank, and they were killing him. The snarling, yelping pack heaved upward and outward in all, directions then. Frank's bloody head emerged like a yacht, shouldering the waves apart. He was bleeding from innumerable gashes, but he still grinned. He caught sight of Laura and

slammed his way to her side. Okay, darling, he panted, if we can only duck those fellows above. The boss let out a blasting roar of rage. He slashed out with his great black whip, straight for Frank's head. Look out, Laura screamed, dragging her husband. down. The lash whistled sharply through the air, inches above his face. The scattered madmen bunched and came on, throwing themselves to the limits of their chains. The boss was a snarling, raging beast, mad even as they were. He smashed downward again, leaning far over the pit in his eagerness to catch this man who had pretended to be mad and was spoiling all his careful plans. The heavy whip snaked out and caught him off balance.

moment he teetered on the very brink while his henchmen rushed with alarm cries to catch him. But it was too late. With a wild, eerie screech he slipped down the smooth rock side into the very midst of the blood-lusting man he'd made into madman. A huge hairy arm reached out, grabbed him by the body, bore him under. His long, thin hand worked madly at his clumsy shroud. A pistol gleamed underneath. He tugged it half out when the avalanche swept over him. Then nothing showed but a snarling, yelping Eddie of brawny bodies. The thugs on the edge of the pit drew back in horror. Guns appeared in their hands.

Again and again they fired into the squirming, swarming mass. Frank caught Laura, dragged her to the extreme end where the fire reflection did not penetrate. Desperately he tried to hoist himself up, but there was no purchase. He slipped and went down again. I'm sorry, Laura. He breathed heavily, but I'm afraid it's no go. They'll finish off those poor devils, and then they'll come for us. She smiled bravely back, trying not to let him see the ache in her heart. She'd found her husband again. Now they were both lost. The sharp crack of the guns punctured the screams of the dying.

Then there were no further yells, and the firing ceased. And for one dreadful moment, there was silence. As they crouched deep into the shadows, away from the flickering ruddiness of the flames, they saw the motionless mass of legs and arms and distorted torsos of those who'd been driven to horrible madness, and who were now dead. They're better off those poor things, Laura whispered. But we? The bus' man will get us, Frank said grimly. Laura clung to his dear, wounded body with aching love.

Fear clutched her heart. There was no escape. There they were, coming to look for them, to make sure everything was over. Feet boomed hollowly on the rock. "'Well, seems like they're all dead,' said one. "'Oh, shuddered the other. "'I see in terrible stuff in my day, but nothing like this. "'And the boss, he's gone.

"'What are we going to do?' "'Do?' echoed the first thugged sarcastic. Oh man, it's a cinch. Now we've got all that stuff for ourselves. We'll slip it out tonight. We'll get those thousands of grand the boss was always beefing about. Hey, cried the other in alarm.

Next, we doesn't touch it. Remember what it did to the first batch of loonies? Sure, that's right. Maybe some of those bozos on the pit ain't dead yet. Yeah, we'll use them. Two figures loomed over the hole. guns at the ready. Frank and Laura pressed against the sides, held themselves motionless.

But they'd been seen. Hey, come out, you there, one shouted exultantly. No, no, Laura whimpered. I'd rather die now than... Frank cried out defiantly. We won't do your hellish world. Okay, fella, the thug grinned. The fiery shadows made him a whole.

devil out of hell. Say your prayers then. I'll kill you and grab the girl. He raised his gun deliberately, taking aim. Lora shrieked and threw herself before her husband. You'll have to kill me too. The thug licked his lips at the sight of her slenderness under the remaining shreds of garments. Oh, not on your life, girl. He, Jerry, he raised his voice. You shoot him, but don't hit the girl. We need her. "'It's no use,' Frank said gently. "'Break away, Laura, darling. "'Let him shoot.

"'But get to the body at the bus. "'He had a gun. "'You only yourself, if necessary.' "'Okay, let him have it.' "'Frank squared his shoulders, "'while Laura dropped in a faint. "'Two shots rang out. "'For a split second, he stood in a daze.

"'Why hadn't those bullets torn through his body?' Then he saw the two gunmen totter and go crashing to the rock below. There were shouts, cries in the thudding of many feet. Then Frank too drifted into the black sea of oblivion. When Laura awoke it was to find herself in Frank's arms, swathed in bandages. His face was pale and drawn, and one arm was in a sling, but his grin was warming.

Dr. Carey was bending over her, busy with the last bandage. "'There, you're all right now,' he said. His Rubicon face was shiny and flushed in the firelight. Lem, the village cobbler, glowered at his side. The other men of the village crowded in the background, muttering and whispering excitedly. "'Rat will split the cashier of radium between us,' Frank was insisting. "'I've got your contract to sell the mountain, of course, but you didn't know at the time what it was worth.' The doctor hesitated and smiled.

Well, all right, if you feel that way. Laura snuggled closer to him. I don't understand, she said, bewildered. Frank grinned. I closed the deal in the village. I didn't tell you, but that's why I made a flying trip to New York. I had a sample of aura I picked up at the base of the mountain that I wanted analyzed. It looked like pitchblend to me, and that was what the chemist said.

Well, there's pitchblend. There's sometimes radium. I took the chance, but someone else had discovered the secret before me and tried to buy the place. I wouldn't sell it to him, Dr. Carey interrupted. He cheated me in a deal years before, and I swore there never to do business with him again. Frank's jaw hardened, so he concocted this scheme, the vilest most devilish since the world began. He caught me with his drove of madmen as I was coming back from the village. Evidently some of them had died, and he needed new.

recruits. He jabbed that needle into me. I fought off the effect, but pretended I was just as mad as the rest. Up here, I learned his plans, but then I couldn't do anything. I waited for my chance, but it never came. I slipped my manacles, but left him on with the spring open. Then, darling, you came. Frank's eyes clouded now. I'll never want to go through that again. We have Dr. Carey to thank for coming in the nick of time. How did you find out about this? The doctor smiled modestly. I had been suspicious about disappearances around here for some time.

I found a trampled trail that led to the rubbly base of the road. I watched there after Laura told me you were gone too, but saw nothing. I hurried over to your house, heard the rest of Laura's story, went back for a more thorough search. Then I saw Laura running up the mountain with the lamb after her. I'd warned Lamb to watch her while I'd warn Lamb to watch her. was gone. Well, Lamb got scared and ran back. From my hiding place I saw Laura seized by a shrouded being who was, well, the one they called the boss. He seemed to disappear into the ground then.

Dr. Carey took a breath and went on. I hurried back to the village, raised the folk, and came back as fast as I could. Tell me, Frank, if you managed to break away from the chain gang once in the woods, why did you come back? Drank grinned sheepishly. Well, I wanted to the worn Laura away. He had not get a posse on my trail. You see, I hadn't learned a thing then as to what it was all about. I was afraid they'd get away, and so I stuck along. Laura squeezed his arm reproachfully. But who? she asked suddenly. Was the devil who caught himself the boss? Gum, Frank said, lifting her to her feet. They hobbled painfully to the fire. On the ground were rows of bodies. The madmen stared peacefully up with the

stars now, all their induced insanity wiped clean from their faces, but the solitary figure that later one side was twisted in a demonic hate. The high bald head was punctured and thrown to one side. The bushy brows were half ripped off and reddened with blood, and beneath the disguise were the unmistakable features of Sheriff Tom Beasley. Laura shivered with cold, as Frank later. her gently away. And so once again, we reach the end of tonight's podcast. My thanks as always to the authors of those wonderful stories and to you for taking the time to listen. Now, I'd ask one small favor of you. Wherever you get your podcast from, please write a few nice words

and leave a five-star review as it really helps the podcast. That's it for this week, but I'll be back again same time, same place, and I do so hope you'll join me once more. Until next time, Sweet dreams and bye-bye.