will be depends on your husbands.”
* * * *
The women were wailing again, their eyes drawn against their wills to where the thing that had been Portia Teele still hung from the chains. Which one was it to be? She had said that it depended on us men. Would she make us draw lots? No, her diabolical brain would think of something infinitely more horrible.
Tala Mag turned to us. “We shall have a hunt,” she said with that completely dissolute smile of hers. “It will be great fun, I promise you. You men will be the hunters, your wives the hunted. The women will be let loose in the grounds, and then you men will be given guns. Not real guns, of course, shooting lead bullets; they will contain tiny pellets which will dissolve when striking the naked skin, leaving a blue mark. The game will last for two hours. At the end of that time you will all be rounded up and the blue marks on the bodies of the women will be counted, and she who has been hit the most times will be handed over to Clops for the caress of his hot irons.”
We gaped at her, finding it hard to understand that even this woman could have conceived of anything so diabolical.
“It will be a fascinating game,” she went on. “Those of you who win, and there will be only one loser, will be permitted to depart unharmed.”
“We won’t do it!” Victor Rooney shouted. “You can’t make us!”
Tala Mag shrugged. “That is entirely up to you. You are all completely in my power, yet I am making a magnanimous gesture by promising freedom to all five of you men and four of the women. If all of you prefer to die unpleasantly instead, very well. But I think that you will all play the game with no further protest.”
What could we do? It was all our lives or the life of only one. We had no choice.
“As in all games, there are rules in this one,” Tala Mag said. “You women, you hunted, will use all your skill, all your ingenuity, out there in the grounds to avoid being shot by the hunters. Not for a moment will you forget the terrible price you will have to pay if you are shot more times than the others. And you men, you will do your best to shoot and hit any woman but your wife, because the more times the others are hit, the greater chance your own wife will have of bearing the fewest marks on her skin. There will be but one bullet in your pistol; when you have shot that, you will return to the terrace where I will hand you another. We must play fair, gentlemen; if I gave you a supply of bullets in advance, you might be unsporting enough to hold a woman and fire repeatedly at her. You must realize that it will be futile to attempt to escape over the walls. One more rule: you may not attempt to protect your own wife from the others. My servants will be everywhere with flashlights, and there will be severe penalties for unsportsmanship.”
Almost it was funny, her talk of sportsmanship. It was when she had finished speaking that the full diabolical cunning of the “game” became clear. Each of us men would have to do our best to condemn one of the other women to appalling torture in order to save his own wife.
“We are ready,” Tala Mag announced. “You women hide yourselves well before we release the men. You know what is at stake.”
They did not move. They crouched there against the wall in a frozen mass of naked flesh. One of the servants went to them with a whip, and then, shrieking, they leaped to their feet and scampered across the room.
* * * *
We were released from our chains and led out to the terrace. We moved with slow, shambling steps, with our eyes fixed on the floor, not one of us looking at the others whose wives each of us would hunt like wild beasts in order to save the woman we loved. And although we were no longer in chains, we made no attempt at resistance, because we knew that our strength was that of babies as compared to that of the monstrous servants. We needed our energy—for the hunt.
A full moon hung above the estate, so that we could see the waterless pool and the overgrown lawn and the hedges and the trees and sections of the wall topped with barbed-wire. On a table on the terrace lay five toy-like pistols. One was handed to each of us. It was like a child’s BB gun, with a small hole on top of the barrel where the pellets were inserted. Tala Mag seated herself at the table. At her right hand was a cardboard box filled with tiny blue pellets, the size of a BB shot. She gave one to each of us and we loaded our pistols and were ready.
Across the track of the moon a white figure ran. Moonbeams flashed on blonde hair and Bob Spaulding cried out, calling frantically to his wife to hide herself. She threw a glance at us over her shoulder, then stumbled among some trees. There was silence out there now and no sight of any of the five women.
“Go,” Tala Mag said.
And we five hunters of naked women set out.
CHAPTER V
HUNT OF THE DAMNED
I am certain that the drinks we had several hours before must have been drugged. However much our minds had been affected by the sight of Portia Teele’s horrible fate and fear of the giant servants and the frenzied urgency to keep our wives from frightful torment, all of that would not have been sufficient to make of us the relentless savage hunters which we became. Yes, it must have been drugs which stripped of us the last veneer of civilization. Without mercy we hunted the wives of our friends, the little pellets in our guns crueler in the end than leaden bullets would have been.
We set out when Tala Mag gave the command. It struck me that most of the women would have run around to the other side of the house. And as soon as I turned the corner, I glimpsed moonbeams dancing on a white arm. The rest of the body was hidden behind a rose bush.
Swiftly I ran up to the bush. When I had almost reached it, the woman behind the bush uttered a terrified cry and leaped to her feet. I saw the blond hair of Inez Spaulding. She put out her hands as if to ward off the pellet. Deliberately I shot at the smooth expanse of her abdomen.
She screamed shrilly then and fell to the ground, writhing and clawing at the blue spot which had appeared on her white skin. God, the pellets consisted of acid which burned the skin! Even those four women who would, in the end, be spared the torture of the white-hot irons, would still suffer untold agony from numerous acid burns.
Feet pounded behind me. Victor Rooney came up, gawked for a moment at Inez Spaulding, then bent close to her and shot a pellet against her thigh. Her screams rose higher. In spite of her pain, she bounded up and stumbled off.
I had said we were not quite human. We raced back to the terrace to get more pellets to inflict more pain on other men’s wives. As I inserted a pellet Tala Mag handed me into my pistol, I heard a shriek from the swimming pool. Whirling, I saw that a naked woman had fallen or jumped over the side and she was crouching there on the dry bottom, trapped, while Spaulding and Cuyler were taking aim at her.
The woman was Helen.
Shrilly I cursed those two men, although a minute before I had shot at Spaulding’s wife as he was now shooting at mine. They both shot and Helen’s body leaped erect, spun, and then she was trying to clamber over the side, her voice hoarse with pain. Rooney had reloaded his pistol and was racing toward where she was trying to climb out. Thinking only that Helen must not be hit again, I threw myself at his feet, and we went down together.
The next moment fire burned across my back. One of the servants stood over me, lashing me with a whip.
He let up at last and I lay there in a welter of anguish. Helen was no longer in the dry swimming pool. None of the men and women were in sight, but from other parts of the grounds I could hear screams.
